Pop Culture 101 - INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

Although at first Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was distributed with little fanfare, it began to generate enthusiastic word of mouth and began to pick up additional bookings in more theaters. It became an unexpected hit, and reviewers began to take notice, particularly overseas, where critics like Francois Truffaut and other French film writers associated with Cahiers du Cinema raved about Siegel's work.

In Europe and in later screenings in the U.S., Invasion of the Body Snatchers was usually shown in its original form, without the studio-mandated epilogue and prologue.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade in 1978, with its setting moved from a small town to San Francisco. With a slight change in some names and an updating of character traits and occupations, the five central roles were taken by Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy.

At the opening of the 1978 sequel, Kevin McCarthy is seen running between cars screaming a warning, as if his character had been frantically trying to get people to believe him for more than 20 years. Although in the original version we see him only outside the cars, slamming against windshields, screaming at the occupants of the vehicles, in the remake we see him in a point of view from inside a car, prompting one observer to note: "He's been waiting 22 years for his reverse shot." Shortly after, McCarthy is hit by a truck, putting him out of his misery for good.

Another version of Jack Finney's original novel was made by Abel Ferrara in 1993 and called simply Body Snatchers, with the action moved to a military base. Another reported remake is roughly scheduled for 2006, although no cast or other details have been revealed yet.

An international sci-fi co-production called Los Nuevos extraterrestres (1983) was also released under the title The Pod People, but the movie has nothing to do with this story. It's actually a take-off on E.T. (1982).

There have been other films with "body snatcher" in the title that have nothing to do with this story. The most famous, The Body Snatcher (1945), based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, has Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi as dealers in illegal cadavers.

The idea that the people you know best and love are being transformed into something alien, changing so that they are not essentially the same people, is a powerful and chilling one that has been used in a number of films. Among them are Invaders from Mars (1953, remade in 1986), in which a little boy sees his parents taken over by aliens; I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958); The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1963), where an entire family is transformed; Dreamcatcher (2003); John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing, and the British film Quatermass II (1957). Variations on the theme have also appeared in The Stepford Wives (1975, 2004), which spawned a series of TV films about Stepford husbands and children; Village of the Damned (1960, 1995), about a group of evil, mind-controlling children conceived while their parents were unconscious during a mysterious alien invasion; and Impulse (1984), in which people drink toxic milk and are transformed into raging Id monsters. There have also been films featuring people who find out either they or their loved ones or both are secretly robots and androids: The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), Blade Runner (1982).

"Pod people" has entered the language as a common term for ultra-conformists and mindless followers of the status quo. There is at least one band by that name, and a December 2004 CBS News report about the popularity of the Apple I-Pod music device was titled "Invasion of the Pod People."

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has inspired study and fan devotion that sometimes verges on the obsessive. Dana Wynter once related a story about a man who was writing a thesis on the film for his degree and measured the distance from one corner to another in the town where it was shot. She also said he told her he studied her line, "I'm here Miles," and found it to be a tritonal B-flat to E to G. He asked her where she came up with such a brilliant idea. "And I thought to myself, 'These people are out of their minds!'" she said.

by Rob Nixon