This is the SF/Horror film that Hollywood will not leave alone. This film made in 1956 has become a classic of dark paranoia. The phrase ‘Pod person’ meaning someone who is not themselves, acting out of character comes from the plot of this movie. Holly will not leave it alone as this film was remade in 1978 staring Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy, then again in 1993 as Body Snatchers, and yet again in 2004 as The Invasion.

While the 1978 film is  decent film and in some way is more consistent with the original vision of the movie, none of the remakes are as good as the original. This essay will have spoilers so if you have not seen the movie, stop and go see it now. Really you should and given that is less than 90 minutes long even you should be able to fit it into your schedule.

Kevin McCarthy plays Dr. Miles Bennell a nice GP working in the small northern Californian town of Santa Mira. The film is constructed with a framing device of Miles, believed to be insane, in custody by the California Highway Patrol and under examination by a psychiatrist. The story is told entirely in flashback and heavy use of voiceovers. (The studio felt the framing device was required, uncertain the audience could follow the events. In my opinion the framing device does weaken the film.)

Miles has returned home to discover a number of patients are reporting that family members are really impostors, and even though the impostors look, sound, and even know every detail that they should, people are convinced that they are impostors. What seems to be a strange contagious mental aberration turns physical when Miles’ friend Jack interrupts Miles on a date with the lovely divorcee’ Becky because there’s something Jack needs Miles to see right now.

What Jack and his wife have to show Miles is a body laid out on the pool table. A body with an unformed face, no finger prints, and no sign of trauma. Later when the body exhibits signs of becoming Jack, Miles starts to put the pieces together. They foursome discovers alien seed-pods growing duplicate bodies, the replace the originals, absorbing their mind and memories as the original sleep, never to awaken.

There is a brief and futile attempt to alert the authorities, but that comes to a bad end when they discover that the authorities are always playing for the other team. Miles and Beck try to escape, pursued by mobs of the replaced hoping, praying that when they reach the highway they can find help and safety.

Unfortunately, exhausted by the nights events, Becky sleeps while Miles looks for a way to the highway and when Miles returns he finds her replaced. Miles flees, with Becky now leading the mobs towards him. Miles makes it to the highway, screaming and begging for help, acting like a madman.

In the concluding element of the frame, the doctors shakes their head at the poor deranged man and his fantastic story until a traffic accident brings the pod a reality not a fantasy to their attention. Alerted, they spring into action to seal off the infection and the film ends.

A couple of thoughts occurred to me while I was re-watching this movie last night. First off this struck me, suddenly, as the starting paradigm for the zombie movie. It has a number of the key elements from most zombie movies. The large mobs of human-like monsters, the conversion process by which we become the monsters, and of course the plea by the characters that they never want to be like that. When the mobs are chasing Miles and Beck I really felt like I was watching a 1956 zombie movie, but with zombie that could be killed and could reason.

The pod-people are not human in the film because they have no emotions. (So I guess this is a Vulcan style invasion.) They live without passion, love, or hatred. Conformity is they rule and they can be no exceptions. In one scene Miles is observing this is really a process many people went though over time, becoming cold and heartless with age, but only when you were in danger of losing it all at once did you fight for it, care about. This resonated with me as the heart of the film, its central theme if you were. (Some have insisted that teh film had a theme about the dangers of communism, anti-communism, and other overtly political themes, but  be the directors and writers denying having such a goal in mind.)

Lastly, I wonder what would happen if instead of trying to remake this film, they simply made a sequel to it. A world torn apart by these things, where there are people fighting back, but also great swaths of the globe already under sway. There’s an interesting setting.

The film is not without its faults. They violate their own rule about how the monster works towards the end of the film. A process that earlier seemed to take several hours, suddenly can be achieved in moments, and just where was the pod the replace Becky at the end. However even with these faults, this film is a classic.