It's here - Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1958 is a sci-fi classic
The poster is in colour but the movie – the 1958 version – is in black and White and best watched in the dead of night, when stars twinkle and who knows what are those lights flashing across the blackness.
Sky Arts screened Invasion of the Body Snatchers this week at 9pm – not late enough for the creepy, gripping sci-fi classic to work its full magic.
It’s close enough when the other channels are full of Z-list celebrity nonsense Who Do You Think You Are? – I don’t care – and DNA Journey – I care even less.
Released in 1956, the American sci-fi horror film stars Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter as a doctor and his girlfriend.
It opens as a psychiatrist, called to the room of a Los Angeles hospital where MCarthy’s character Dr Miles Bennell is being held in custody, listens as Bennell recounts the events leading up to his arrest.
Like DOA, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is told in flashback and unfolds over 80 minutes in all its paranoid, claustrophobic terror.
Set in remote small-town America – one of sci-fi B-movies’ many tropes – Santa Mira in California, Miles, his girlfriend Becky Driscoll and their friends and neighbours Jack and Teddy find ‘pods’ – not unlike giant pea pods – have been planted in their homes.
Inside each pod is a feature-less human-like form, waiting for the town’s inhabitants to go to sleep so they can inhabit their minds and bodies.
Not long after the discovery, the quartet notice their fellow townsfolk look like the people they know but are devoid of emotion.
The plot to take over Earth is being carried out by aliens – creatures from another world – and there are hundreds of them.
What chance do four people have of convincing skeptical authorities that extra-terrestrials have landed? When those figures of government and law enforcement have been taken over, no chance.
They plan to run away – and alert the world. Only, they must stay awake for days – a device later used in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise – from the desert town, avoid capture and raise the alarm.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is full of heart-pounding pursuits, shock moments and a final pulsating plea as McCarthy – the film would have been available in 3D originally – screams at people on the LA freeway.
“You’re fools. You’re in danger. They are after you. They are after us all. They’re here already.”
The movie can be viewed as an allegory for McCarthyism –Senator Joe McCarthy’s paranoid purge of those he suspected of Communism. He persecuted individuals, often without evidence, and saw ‘Reds under the bed’ everywhere.
It can just be watched as a superior sci-fi B-movie up there with Forbidden Planet, Invaders from Mars, The Thing From Another World and I Married a Monster From Outer Space.