Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I believe there are two kinds of people in the world – those who take pleasure in being scared and those who do not. A friend of mine told me that when he was a kid, he and his buddies would sneak out at midnight, go to a nearby cemetery, and take turns hiding behind headstones while the others walked through, never sure when a hand was going to reach out and grab them unexpectedly. My friend loved it. Personally, I would rather be waterboarded. I hate that kind of stuff and so, unpopular an opinion as it is, I also really don’t like horror movies. It’s not that I’m unreasonably scared of them or can’t separate real life from the fictional world of a movie. It’s just that I don’t enjoy them, especially the gory ones. The upswing of torture porn that began in the early 2000s with movies like Saw and Hostel leaves me colder than a dismembered corpse north of the Arctic Circle. There’s a spiritual bleakness and a physical brutality in them that I find off-putting to say the least.

But it is Halloween, after all, and so I feel obligated to make a recommendation for a some kind of a scary movie, even if it’s old, black and white, and doesn’t feature anything more gory than a minor cut on a character’s hand. 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, still retains its punch after more than sixty years since its release. Remade, imitated, and ripped off, you’ve probably seen a dozen films inspired by it, but if you haven’t seen the original, you really should and there’s no time like the present Halloween to do it.

It stars Kevin McCarthy as the young, smart-allecky, and recently divorced Miles Bennell, a family doctor in the idyllic California town of Santa Mira. Two things happen at the outset of the film. First, Miles reconnects with his foxy and also newly divorced former sweetheart, Becky Driscoll, played by Dana Wynter. Second, people around him begin to have a curious delusion: they insist that the people in their lives, their uncle, their mother, aren’t actually them. That they have been replaced somehow by an almost but not quite exact duplicate of themselves.   

Over time, it becomes apparent that it’s no delusion but that someone or something is taking over and replacing the local sheriff, the mom next door, the school kid running down the street. Miles and Becky grow closer and closer as they try to escape the once-peaceful little town that’s now ground zero for body snatchers.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers isn’t pure horror. It’s a paranoid sci fi thriller with elements of horror, film noir, melodrama, and political allegory. It’s special effects are pretty lo fi, and as I mentioned there’s zero gore. But having said that, the paranoia is ratcheted up to eleven and the images of the entire town gathering in the square to pick up their body snatcher pods to distribute is chilling. The most intense moments of the film are when Miles discovers a duplicate body being hatched out of a pod in a green house. Twitching, foaming, and undulating, it’s a marvel of production design and cinematography. As the new body pushes and flops its way out of the pod, you’ll find it’s as creepy and unsettling a sight as you could want on Halloween.

At 80 minutes, the film has zero time for excess. It is lean and efficient as it hurtles to its end. The black and white cinematography in particular is gorgeous. The high contrast makes every shadow pitch black and every white look like a search light is pointed at it. McCarthy and Wynter’s banter is sexy and light while their sweaty-faced panic feels real and potent.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the perfect Halloween movie for people who want to be unsettled and thrilled without being grossed out.