Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Barry Keith Grant

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781844572786
• eBook ISBN: 9781838716417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Upon its release in 1956, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers was widely perceived as another 'B' movie thriller in the cycle of science fiction and horror films that proliferated in the 1950s. Yet the film addresses numerous issues brewing in post-war US society, including the Cold War, McCarthyism and the changing dynamics of gender relations. In the fifty years since the film's release, its reputation has grown from cult status to become an acknowledged classic of American cinema. With its narrative of emotionless alien duplicates replacing average folk, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the first post-war horror film to locate the monstrous in the everyday, thus marking it as a pivotal moment in American horror film history four years before Psycho. In this first comprehensive critical study of the film, Barry Keith Grant traces Invasion's historical and generic contexts to explore the importance of Communism and conformity, post-war modernity and gender politics in order to understand the film's cultural significance and metaphorical weight. He also provides an account of the film's fraught production history and offers an extended discussion of the distinctive contributions of the production personnel. Concluding with a consideration of the three remakes it has inspired, Grant illustrates how Invasion of the Body Snatchers' enduring popularity derives from its central metaphor for the monstrous, which has proven as flexible as that of the vampire and the zombie.

1 Popcorn and Podsnappery

In the 1950s, Hollywood’s big movies became ‘bigger and better than ever’, largely as a response to the perceived competition of the new medium of television. After the success of Merian C. Cooper’s This Is Cinerama (1952), the decade saw the majors release a series of very popular big-budget films in a variety of widescreen formats. Paramount developed VistaVision, first used for White Christmas (1954) and then for some of the studio’s other big films including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), billed as ‘the greatest event in motion picture history’. Twentieth Century-Fox released The Robe (1953), The King and I (1956) and several other major productions in CinemaScope. Oklahoma! (1955) was distributed by RKO in both Todd-AO and CinemaScope versions. All of these movies emphasised surface spectacle over thematic depth, entertainment over engagement. According to Murray Pomerance, ‘the gaudy, intoxicating culture of the screen was perhaps never so removed from the pressures and concerns of everyday life as during this decade’.¹⁰

This denial of the real is certainly true of, for example, Around the World in 80 Days, one of the biggest films of 1956, the same year as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A blockbuster spectacle shot in lavish Technicolor and in Todd-AO, and winner of five Academy Awards including Best Picture, its story concerns an epic race around the world against time by Victorian Englishman Phileas Fogg (David Niven). The film’s global narrative scope is telling in the context of contemporary world events. Several European colonies achieved independence at that time, and in the summer of 1956 Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, the major shipping route in the Middle East, resulting in an international political crisis. Even as these events marked the beginning of the end of Europe’s colonial era, Around the World in 80 Days depicted an Anglo-European’s global mobility at the height of the British Empire due to a combination of technology and tenacity, with other countries becoming merely exotic backdrops that allow this white European male to achieve his goals.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers stands in stark contrast to these big pictures in every respect. The film offers a paranoid vision of empire, concentrating instead on images of entrapment and enclosure as part of a nightmarish scenario in which America is besieged on its own turf. Like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), it is a horror story about colonisation coming home to roost. As in Wells’s tale, the film depicts an invasion of the homeland, this time as an archetypal town is infiltrated and conquered. As one of the pod spokesmen says to Miles in the novel, ‘After all – what have you people done – with the forests that covered the continent? And the farm lands you’ve turned into dust? You, too, have used them up – and then … moved on. Don’t look so shocked.’¹¹ Interestingly, the first Hollywood adaptation of War of the Worlds was directed by Byron Haskin, one of Siegel’s mentors during his apprenticeship at Warner Bros., and released just three years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers. One can only speculate about the influence that Haskin, who directed a number of other notable science fiction films including Conquest of Space (1955), Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and The Power (1968), may have had on the future director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Certainly Haskin’s The Naked Jungle (1954), an adaptation of Carl Stephenson’s famous short story ‘Leinigen versus the Ants’, about a European plantation owner in Brazil who battles an invading horde of omnivorous ants, also shares with Invasion of the Body Snatchers a vision of the coloniser besieged. In Santa Mira, as Danny Peary aptly points out,

Colonialism coming home to roost

a town where the Spanish must have pushed out the native Indian population, and subsequently English-speaking Americans must have pushed out the Spanish, the pod people are just one more in a long line of invaders who are bent on wiping out the previous culture.¹²

Lacking A-picture production values and shot in moody black and white, Invasion of the Body Snatchers features no expansive or scenic landscapes, as in many of the gorgeous colour Westerns of the period. Instead, claustrophobia and menace suffuse the film’s mise en scène. Even the hills that surround Santa Mira seem to hem the town in, to constrain it, rather than to provide a picturesque backdrop. The film’s very rejection of the bloated production values of Hollywood’s big pictures is consistent with its critique of contemporary American society as empty and bland on the inside. With its downbeat ambience and lack of big stars, tagged with lowbrow genre labels and offering minimal special effects, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was mostly another creature feature for Allied Artists, the studio that would also distribute, among others, Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), The Blob (1958), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and House on Haunted Hill (1959). Even before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Allied Artists had distributed The Maze (1953), shot in 3-D, and Target Earth (1954), participating in the period’s prolific production of science fiction and horror films that John Baxter aptly dubbed ‘Springtime for Caliban’.¹³

Claustrophobia and menace suffuse the film’s mise en scène

Unlike so many of the period’s blockbuster productions, more often it was the low-budget exploitation SF and horror movies that acknowledged the era’s social and political tensions, albeit comfortably ensconced within the coded terms of genre. Most of the beasts that slouched, slithered, soared or staggered across American movie screens of the decade were explained as being caused by nuclear testing or alien invasion, both metaphors for Cold War fears. The ‘space race’ in the films that preceded these monster movies is explicitly motivated by military considerations rather than by the disinterested destiny of objective science. Destination Moon (1950), the film that launched the decade’s spate of science fiction films, envisions the first successfully manned lunar flight and urges that ‘whoever controls the moon will control the Earth’. When the astronauts land on the lunar surface they claim the moon ‘by the grace of God’ and ‘for the benefit of mankind’ in the name of the United States. The film implies the existence of an interstellar domino theory and thus provides ideological support for American imperialism. The same idea informs the work of the astronomer (Arthur Franz) in Invaders from Mars (1953), who remarks that the nation’s reason for conquering space is that ‘If anybody dared attack us, we could push a few buttons and destroy them in a matter of minutes.’

When monsters were not threatening the nation’s urban centres – Los Angeles in War of the Worlds, New York in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms – they operated in the average American town, yet posed an equally insidious threat. Rather than wholesale death and destruction, these creatures brought something perhaps more horrible, a life-in-death, a state of being in which, somehow, one was not his or her true self. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, movies such as It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invaders from Mars, and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) reflected both Cold War fears of the Communist conspiracy from afar and of colourless conformity at home, particularly in the wake of McCarthyism, as in their plots people are taken over by alien Others. Similar concerns informed SF writing of the period as well in such novels as Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951) and Murray Leinster’s The Brain Stealers (1954).

Although none of these films achieved the cultural resonance of Siegel’s film, Invaders from Mars offers a particularly illuminating comparison to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for its similarities as well as differences. The film’s plot involves a boy, David (Jimmy Hunt), whom no one will believe when he tries to warn people about an alien invasion. From his bedroom window one night, David witnesses a flying saucer land in the sand pit over the rise adjacent to his home. He tells his parents, and although they refuse to believe him, David persists in his story, and the next morning his father (Leif Erickson) goes off to inspect the sand pit. He returns acting strangely distant and wooden. The same thing then happens to his mother (Hillary Brooke). As we discover later, his parents have been sucked underground by the Martian invader (there is in fact only one) and his android servants, programmed through needles implanted in their necks and attached to the base of their brains, and then returned to the surface to carry out the alien’s scheme to sabotage the US’s nascent space programme. The Martian’s plan reflects anxieties about Communist expansion, figured as underground burrowing – in this case, right into the nation’s ‘own backyard’. As in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the people of the town are taken over, with no one aware of what is transpiring except David. Finally, the boy manages to convince the authorities of the truth of his story, and the nearby army base is alerted and mobilised. The military blasts its way into the alien spacecraft, and the Martian and his android slaves are forced to retreat. As the ship is taking off, the army blows it up and everyone who had been programmed by the alien wakes to normal consciousness.

The film’s director, William Cameron Menzies, who also made the British science fiction film Things to Come (1936), adapted by H. G. Wells from his own book, was better known as a set designer, having worked with Hitchcock and many other important Hollywood directors. For his work on Gone with the Wind in 1939, David O. Selznick created the credit ‘production designer’. Menzies designed his own sets for Invaders from Mars, and they effectively enhance the feeling of entrapment experienced by the young protagonist, as in, for example, the radically foreshortened police station with its surrealistically bare walls, into which David comes for help before realising that the police chief has already been taken over. Little Jimmy Grimaldi’s (Bobby Clark) cry in Miles’s office that his mother isn’t his mother (‘Don’t let her get me’) echoes David’s similar protest in Invaders from Mars, which in a way is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers told from Jimmy Grimaldi’s point of view. But the look of Menzies’s film is very different from Siegel’s: where Invaders from Mars exhibits a stylised minimalism, Invasion of the Body Snatchers reveals an eye for mundane detail, like the signs advertising Red-e-Crete concrete and Sunbeam electric mixers in the window of Mr Driscoll’s hardware store, that is perfectly appropriate for conveying its paranoid scenario of the horror within the normal.

Strikingly, Invaders from Mars also features a coda that, like the frame in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, similarly subverts comfortable closure. As the Martian spaceship blows up, the film cuts to David starting awake in his bed in the middle of the night. His parents comfort him, like Dorothy’s kindly aunt and uncle at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939), from what we now understand has all along been David’s nightmare. Then, trying to go back to sleep in his own bed, David sees flashing lights and goes to his window, where he sees a flying saucer landing in the sand pit just as he had in his dream at the beginning of the film. ‘Gee whiz’, exclaims an awed David again at the end as he gazes skyward from his window just as he had in the film’s opening scene. The opening shot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, behind the credits, is of a sky, clouds scudding across the screen in fast motion. The rapid movement of the clouds is unnatural, suggesting that something is awry in the world, a feeling reinforced by the clouds themselves, which seem to grow darker and more ominous as the shot progresses. While this portentous image may have become a cliché of more recent apocalyptic films, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers the connotations of a gathering storm are clear enough. At the beginning of the decade, The Thing from Another World concluded with the journalist’s warning to humanity to ‘Keep watching the skies!’, an injunction reiterated first in Invaders from Mars and again three years later in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The gathering storm

2 Pod People

For Al LaValley, who has provided the most detailed account of the film’s production in print, the tensions between the several major creative personalities responsible for Invasion of the Body Snatchers is reflected in the rather diverse readings the film has inspired. However, the intersecting interests of the film’s various creators, and the alacrity with which the film was made, suggest a more harmonious process – at least until after production had wrapped. It was only later, in postproduction, that delays occurred as the film went through a series of changes, including extensive recutting as...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Popcorn and Podsnappery
• 2. Pod People
• 3. The Siegel Question
• 4. Roots and Tendrils
• 5. Politics of the Pods
• 6. The Meaning of Fear
• 7. Bad Seeds
• Notes
• Credits
• Select Bibliography
• eCopyright