Wel­come to The Pod Peo­ple Film Fes­ti­val, The Dork Report’s third mini movie ret­ro­spec­tive. After catch­ing up with Rid­ley Scott and George A. Romero, we now take a look at four adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers, plus one unof­fi­cial homage / satire.

1. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1956)
2. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978)
3. Body Snatch­ers (1993)
4. The Fac­ulty (1998)
5. The Inva­sion (2007)

For a pulpy 1950s hor­ror flick relat­ing the strange tale of an inva­sion of giant brus­sels sprouts, Don Siegel’s Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers is a star­tlingly gory, para­noid night­mare pos­i­tively loaded with polit­i­cal sub­text. Its themes of iden­tity, mis­trust, and sub­ver­sion have remained rel­e­vant and influ­en­tial for decades, inspir­ing three offi­cial remakes and even left-field homages like Robert Rodríguez’ high school melo­drama The Fac­ulty. Not only has “pod peo­ple” entered the lex­i­con, its screen­play is highly quotable (“They’re here already! You’re next!”) and some­times even rather poetic: “There’ll be no more tears.”

The movie can be a bit frus­trat­ing to mod­ern sci­ence fic­tion afi­ciona­dos used to high pseudo-scientific detail. The aliens’ life cycle seems illog­i­cal and not fully thought-through, to the extent that it harms the plot. It seems a vic­tim sim­ply must be in prox­im­ity to an alien pod for it to begin to grow into your shape. We also learn that a pod absorbs its host’s mem­o­ries when it sleeps, but we see Becky Driscoll (Dana Wyn­ter) dupli­cated after falling asleep alone in a cave devoid of any vis­i­ble pods. What hap­pens to the orig­i­nal bod­ies? How do the pod-born dupli­cates wind up wear­ing the host’s clothes? Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake is more clear on the process, with the added ben­e­fit of allow­ing for more explicit gore and female nudity to tart things up a bit. The 2007 remake Inva­sion solves these prob­lems by side­step­ping the issue entirely, fea­tur­ing a breed of aliens that lit­er­ally invade your body — a mild con­di­tion which is, it turns out, cur­able. Ask your doc­tor, or bet­ter yet, date one!

Eat your brus­sels sprouts! Or you’re next!

As Matthew Dessem points out in his analy­sis of The Blob for the Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion, cer­tain 1950s hor­ror and sci-fi movies beg to be inter­preted as metaphors for key atomic age issues: Godzilla, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Blob among them. But these mon­sters look just like us. So let’s give it a shot. Inter­pre­ta­tion one: the movie man­i­fests a gen­er­al­ized fear of a homog­e­nized Amer­i­can cul­ture. A pod per­son is dis­cov­ered in an inter­me­di­ary state, totally devoid of indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics like a man­nequin. Per­haps America’s fabled melt­ing pot, brought to an absurd con­clu­sion, could result in a dead-end mono­cul­ture of of uni­form reli­gion, pol­i­tics, and behav­ior. Inter­pre­ta­tion two: the story is a thinly veiled metaphor for McCarthy­ism, the con­tem­po­rary Red Scare that envis­aged insid­i­ous Com­mu­nist sleeper cells already among us, threat­en­ing to undo Amer­i­can churches, fam­i­lies, pri­vate wealth, and gov­ern­ment. In either inter­pre­ta­tion, the invaders are con­vinced their sys­tems of belief are cor­rect, and hon­estly believe they are help­ing us by absorb­ing us into their ranks.

Pod per­son in the cor­ner pocket.

The premise may be deli­ciously cyn­i­cal, but the movie does end on a pos­si­ble note of hope. Our hero Dr. Miles Ben­nell (Kevin McCarthy) man­ages to reach some unin­fected human author­ity fig­ures, and cor­rob­o­rat­ing evi­dence helps him con­vince them to mobi­lize against the threat. But does this call to action come too late? From the per­spec­tive of 2009, Amer­ica looks increas­ingly polar­ized and par­ti­san. If the pod peo­ple are already here, which side are they on? As Sarah Palin might say, the Real Amer­ica? I’m sure they only want to help.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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