The fear was if you call the movie “The Body Snatchers,” you run the risk of people confusing it with the 1945 Val Lewton number inspired by the Burke and Hare case.

But it was a production beset with problems, most of them exacted by studio executives who may well have been pod people themselves.įirst came the wrangling over the title. Yes, there’s some undeniable political and social commentary afoot here, which you can dig out if you so choose, but it’s secondary to a taut and still terrifying film that hasn’t aged at all in its portrayal of creeping paranoia and isolation, of a man alone in a world that has no more use for his type. There’s little new to be said about Don Siegel’s enduring and justified sci-fi classic. The ongoing legacy of cinematic adaptations of The Body Snatchers is an odd, twisty, and, at times, confounding one with more than a few hints that the pods themselves might be behind it all. Director Philip Kaufman has said the same thing. Shortly before he died, director Don Siegel noted that the world seemed to be increasingly populated by pod people. Ending aside, it remains a relevant, even prescient story all these years later, which may help explain why film versions continue to crop up every decade or so, and why they seem to be appearing with greater and greater frequency. It’s worth noting, after all, that at novel’s end, the aliens decide the human race is too resistant to their plan, so they pack up and go home.įortunately, most of the filmmakers who’ve taken a stab at bringing Finney’s novel to the screen have politely ignored that part of the book. It was read as an indictment of the suburban conformity of the Eisenhower years and, more generally, as a protest against the loss of emotion, imagination, and individual identity in a mechanized age.įinney would deny all those things, insisting he was just trying to write an exciting sci-fi thriller. On the flipside, it was also seen as a cautionary tale about creeping totalitarianism in the wake of the McCarthy Era. It’s been held up as a shining example of Cold War paranoia, reflecting American fear of communist infiltration. Although inspired, at least in part, by Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel The Puppetmasters and possibly William Cameron Menzies’ 1953 Invaders from Mars, Finney’s novel took a much darker tone and employed a handful of standard noirish elements, which left the story open to countless social and political interpretations. The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney’s novel about an insidious and silent alien invasion that threatens to turn the world’s population into a horde of emotionless, single-minded replicant drones, was published in 1955 after starting life as a magazine serial.

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