The Canon: "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and the Shadow of Noir

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is more than just a theme, although that’s sometimes easy to forget.  The film opened in theaters on February 5th, 1956, sixty years ago today, in the height of American anxiety over Russia.  Since then, three remakes pushed the core concept into new generational anxieties.  The 1978 remake nudged its elbow at new age self-help cults like EST.  The 1993 remake joked on the idea of the USA's "army of one."  The 2007 remake suggested that pod-people group think might be necessary to avoid environmental collapse.  These zeitgeisty undercurrents make discussing the Body Snatcher films a fun sort of social thought experiment: what does each film say about its respective era?

But is a movie like Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers best treated as an encapsulation of one generation's fear?  By minimizing the story and the style for the sake of its ripped-from-the-headlines subtexts, do we lose Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the process, ignoring real virtues in pursuit of possible reflections?

The story idea of aliens hiding in plain sight as humans didn't begin with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, of course.  Jack Finney’s source novel followed in the footsteps of classic horror stories like The Shadow Out of Time, The Puppet Masters, and John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?"  Even on film, movies like Invaders From Mars and It Came From Outer Space predated Siegel's film with stories of friends and family puppeteered by creatures from beyond the stars.  Yet even with all that precedent, Invasion of the Body Snatchers stands as the touchstone of its intriguing little sub-genre.

In spite of a blustery prologue (more on that later), the film opens quietly: Doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns to his home town of Santa Mira after a professional conference.  While driving home, a child races past the front of his car.  Because Santa Mira’s a small town, Miles knows that the fearful boy is Jimmy Grimaldi, and when he returns to his office, Miles name-checks his clients as they walk through their small town rhythms.  There's Wally Everhart selling insurance on the corner.   There's Bill Pintner taking his secretary to lunch.  The familiarity and calm of Santa Mira recall the paintings of Norman Rockwell; Everytown USA as it exists in our collective nostalgia.

Upon his arrival, Miles learns that many patients requested appointments in his absence, only to cancel.  One of the few people Miles sees is... why, little Jimmy Grimaldi, who's convinced his mother isn't his mother.  "Don't let her get me!" he wails.  More cases like this emerge.  Miles’ friend Danny theorizes the anxiety as a neuroses brought on by "worry about what's going on in the world."  The reality of the invasion doesn't hit Miles or his reignited flame Becky (Dana Wynter) until halfway through the film.  That’s not an approximation: the pod reveal occurs exactly 40 minutes into an 80-minute movie.

Miles sees movement in a greenhouse, investigates, and finds what Becky calls “huge seed pods!”  Bubbles fizz from the pods’ seams.  Human-shaped blobs pop out in soggy plops.  It's a literal centerpiece scene, immediately one of the great images of cinematic horror.  The stakes sharpen to a point.  If the aliens catch the two heroes, their pods take over.  If the heroes fall asleep, their pods take over.  A quick note: Miles calls one of the seed-bodies a "blank," which may be the inspiration for the term used by the heroes of Edgar Wright's excellent body-snatcher tribute The World's End.

With the second half of the film operating on chase mode, Siegel tempers the pace with eerie inversions of previous moments.  Jimmy Grimaldi, the boy who raced past Miles, now chuckles beside his mother.  Becky's earlier comment about her father skipping dinner to see a friend pays off with her heartbroken admission that she doubted his humanity days prior.  Miles' friend Danny, the man who bloviated about the worries of the world, also can’t shut up while discussing the superiority of the invading race.

As Danny explains, "Love, desire, ambition, faith-- without them, life's so much simpler."  The idea of ambition and faith as meaningless pursuits is the closest the film comes to staking out any sort of social commentary, and that line suggests that the pod people hew more closely to the godless equity of communism than the witch-trial panic of McCarthyism.  Fun fact: in 1956, the same year Invasion of the Body Snatchers opened in theaters, the United States government adopted "In God We Trust" as the national motto, intended as a take-that to Russia's state atheism.  The words appeared on all U.S. currency starting the following year.

While those political clues suggest subtext, Invasion of the Body Snatchers otherwise avoids social statements, keeping its fear-of-the-collective broad.  The most important detail of the pod people is that they have no emotion.  They offer only the "pretense" of feeling, in the same way members of a lynch mob or rioting crowd lose their identities to the overwhelming sway of the masses.  This idea, more than any other element in the film, gives Invasion of the Body Snatchers its lasting power as a horror movie: the film hones in on a crucial universal fear, the fear of losing our distinction, our identity, even our humanity, and executes that tension to unbearable effect.

What less successful elements there are in Invasion of the Body Snatchers come from studio efforts to make the film optimistic.  Prior to release, the studio pushed Don Siegel to re-tool his original cut.  Two additions smoothed over the dark attitude of the story: a framing device with Miles explaining his nightmare to police and a voice-over narration that fills in small narrative pauses.  These pockets of narration often arrive over establishing shots, scene closes - film grammar that modern movies have all but abandoned.  These two changes create both problems and rewards.

The framing story too quickly convinces us of Miles' safety, and the scenes look perfunctory on a style level: basic staging, flatter lighting, with none of the shadow-play of the main story.  Meanwhile, the voice-over narration lapses into redundancy.  Miles narrates, "Maybe they hadn't taken over the pay phones” right before Miles declares on-screen, "I'll try the pay phone."  When Miles runs at the end, he helpfully narrates, "So I ran!"  Throughout, Miles speaks of unease, hidden terror, and worry as we watch him calmly walk in and out of cars and drive away.

However, the changes create another side-effect.  By introducing a framing story involving the arrival of the authorities and a terse narration of how things went south, the creative staff bring the film closer in line to the spirit of film noir.

Think of how classic film noir like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard opened with heroes reflecting on how their lives fell apart.  How films like Detour and Murder My Sweet played with characters narrating their own improbable stories.  No surprise, most of the movie-making team behind Invasion of Body Snatchers previously worked in film noir.  Director Don Siegel cut his industry teeth directing crime thrillers like The Verdict and Count the Hours.  Screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring adapted his novel Build My Gallows High for the screen as classic noir Out of the Past.  Even the cinematographer and editor's most recent works were Poverty Row throwbacks with B-picture-ready names like Sudden Danger and Bait.

This perfect storm of experience pushes against Invasion of the Body Snatchers like a cold wind, imbalancing the viewer just a little more.  The dominant image of Invasion, instead of rubber-masked monsters or stop-motion saucers, is heroes in criss-crossed light and shadow.  The source of the eerie effect varies: window blinds, greenhouse walls, staircase railings.  The motif peaks during the climax, when survivors Miles and Becky, on the run from their body-snatched town, spy an earthen pit in a tunnel.  They slide in and cover themselves with slats of lumber.  The villains race overhead, and shadow and light alternate on the heroes' faces.

This visual motif might simply be a holdover technique of noir, used in Invasion not to suggest meaning but to give visual interest to a story that by necessity deals with familiar, even banal imagery: Main Street locations and middle-aged friendly sorts.  However, crime dramas often played with striped shadow to suggest prison bars - something their morally compromised characters feared. In Invasion, Miles and Becky become prisoners quickly; Miles to his hospital offices, Becky to her home, both of them prisoners to a town they once knew and no longer recognize.

Of course, Santa Mira looks the same.  Even identical, despite the apocalyptic visitors.  Late in the story, Miles and Becky retreat to the hospital office.  The sun rises, and the two heroes watch the town from the second floor.  They study the people.  There's Len Perlman.  Bill Pintner.  Jim Clark and his wife Shirley and their kids.  Miles mutters, "Just like any Saturday morning."  Then a city alarm sounds, and the citizens of Santa Mira emerge.  No scaly skin or pitch-black eyes.  No decaying flesh.  They don't carry the red flag of the Soviets or the volatility of Uncle Joe McCarthy.  The terror of Invasion of the Body Snatchers lies in us understanding that, as they all stride toward the town square, the villains of Santa Mira look like completely normal people.

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"The Canon" is a series of essays aimed at exploring classic horror films from a fresh context.

The Fly and Organic Unity

Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Film Noir

Pulse and Suicide

Scream and Slasher Generations