Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) (4K UHD)

Director: Don Siegel
Screenplay: Daniel Mainwaring (based on the Collier’s magazine serial by Jack Finney)
Stars: Kevin McCarthy (Dr. Miles J. Bennell), Dana Wynter (Becky Driscoll), Larry Gates (Dr. Dan “Danny” Kauffman), King Donovan (Jack Belicec), Carolyn Jones (Theodora “Teddy” Belicec), Jean Willes (Nurse Sally Withers), Ralph Dumke (Police Chief Nick Grivett), Virginia Christine (Wilma Lentz), Tom Fadden (Uncle Ira Lentz), Kenneth Patterson (Stanley Driscoll), Guy Way (Officer Sam Janzek), Eileen Stevens (Anne Grimaldi), Beatrice Maude (Grandma Grimaldi), Jean Andren (Eleda Lentz), Bobby Clark (Jimmy Grimaldi)
MPAA Rating: NR
Year of Release: 1956
Country: U.S.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 4K UHD + Blu-ray
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Early in Danse Macabre, his wide-ranging 1981 survey of all things horror, author Stephen King writes about one of the essential elements of the horror genre, what he calls “phobic pressure points”: “The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of.” He then notes that, beyond the personal, there are national and cultural phobic pressure points—“fears which exist across a wide spectrum of people. Such fears, which are often political, economic, and psychological rather than supernatural, give the best work of horror a pleasing allegorical feel.” King then suggests that these cultural phobic pressure points are best exemplified in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a low-budget classic that welled up in the heady turmoil of the McCarthy-addled mid-1950s, a period that saw the decline of the horror genre and the ascension of science fiction. The film’s brilliance lies in the way it splits the difference between the two genres, turning the potential wonders of outer space into a nightmare about inner space—that is, the nebulous world of our minds and souls and what would happen if they suddenly disappeared. The film’s horrors aren’t external and physical (there is no grotesque, rampaging monstrosity on display, although there are some gooshy alien pods); rather the horrors are internal and psychological, drawing on the Freudian notion of the uncanny to unnerve us with the idea of seeing something “normal” but knowing that it isn’t.

Based on Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers, which was originally serialized in Collier’s magazine in 1954, and directed by B-movie auteur Don Siegel (Riot in Cell Block 11), Invasion of the Body Snatcher is set in the fictional northern California town of Santa Mira, which is presented as a perfectly ideal, perfectly normal, perfectly ordinary small town. The story begins in chaos, as a wild-eyed physician named Dr. Miles J. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), who is being held by the police at a hospital, spins a wild story to a psychiatrist about how his town has been taken over by alien pods hatched from interstellar spores.

These aliens have usurped the bodies of all his friends and neighbors, turning them into unfeeling automatons. We see the action unfold in flashback, with Miles’s voice-over narration lending the film a distinctly noir-esque sensibility (like the best film noir, the story begins at the end so that we can witness the inevitable unfold, which casts its characters not as active agents, but as unwitting pawns in a design far outside their ability to control). Miles is called back from a conference by numerous patients complaining of people in their lives seeming strange or not themselves. In the process, he is reintroduced to Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), a childhood girlfriend who has recently returned to town after getting a divorce (which the film subtly implies by letting us know that she has been “in Reno,” where Miles himself was five months earlier).

Miles and Becky soon learn that his patients aren’t crazy, but rather are recognizing that their loved ones have been replaced by alien replicas, an idea that digs deep into our longstanding belief in the Cartesian mind/body split. The film’s premise is that bodies can be duplicated exactly—right down to birth marks and recent wounds—as can the brain’s gray matter, full of memories and intimate knowledge that can be immediately recalled. This process takes place when the person sleeps, during which time a full likeness grows inside a giant seed pod nearby. The body itself, until it is fully formed, is a strange amalgam of fetus and cadaver, both newly born, yet seemingly dead. Once the process is complete, though, there is no physical distinction from the original. However, the soul—the personality, the spirit, whatever you want to call it that makes each person a unique individual—cannot be duplicated. Instead, it is replaced with a conformist nonpersonality that is fundamentally unfeeling, an idea that is constantly reinforced via the dialogue: Becky speaks of “humanity slowly draining away,” and a woman notes that “there’s something missing” in her Uncle Ira, “a special look in his eyes.” That “special look” might be thought of as the human spirit—the soul—that which can never be replicated because it is what makes us fundamentally human. The horror of Invasion of the Body Snatchers isn’t necessarily the idea that aliens are taking over the world (although that is happening), but rather that we are individually disappearing, losing ourselves to an ambiguous mass conformity.

With its paranoid sensibility, concerns about dehumanization, and release in the mid-1950s, it was virtually guaranteed that Invasion of the Body Snatchers would be viewed as some kind of allegory about communism (Jack Finney always found it amusing that so much was read into the story, because he long claimed in interviews that his source novel has “no meaning at all”). The fact that it can be read as either an anti-McCarthy screed (with the pod people representing all the Americans willing to accept political conformity and individual suppression if it means safety from the Reds) or as an anti-communist screed (with the pod people representing soulless communists coming to overthrow democracy) is indicative of how thematically and politically complex the film is.

At its core, whether you see it as anti-McCarthy or anti-communist or some confused hybrid, the film plays on the fear of our institutionalized social systems turning against us. Note, for example, how authority figures are some of the first to become pod people—police officers, doctors, community leaders, etc.—so that, when everyday would-be heroes go to them for help, they are faced with the demise of all that they had previously relied on. From a paranoid perspective, it seems only natural that such authority figures would “turn” first because they were corrupt anyway; it is just a transformation of one form of corruption to another. The film also goes out of its way to subvert the authority of psychiatrists and psychiatry in general, which constantly and mistakenly attempts to locate the change in the person who has not been replaced. Psychiatrists can only come up with explanations of “mass hysteria” and “hallucinations,” when the truth is something far outside their purview and much, much worse. The medical profession constantly locates the problem in the wrong mind, thus blinding themselves to the greater reality.

Despite being a masterpiece of its kind, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not exactly perfect. I have always been bothered by its lack of consistency and physical detail about how exactly the duplicating process takes place (a problem that is inherent to Finney’s novel). What, exactly, happens to the original after it has been duplicated? There is suggestion that it is somehow “destroyed,” but nothing more is given (Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake supplies an answer, with the human body collapsing into a pile of dust after it has been duplicated). There is also no rhyme or reason regarding how long it takes for a person to be duplicated. Instead, the duration seems to be wholly reliant on the mechanics of the plot: If they need to draw out suspense, the process might take all night; if a sudden shock is in order, then it might take 10 minutes.

The film is also hampered by its ending, as a studio-enforced frame narrative that ultimate suggests that all will be set right by the authorities undermines what had been an absolutely nightmarish descent into the inevitable. The film should have concluded as it was originally intended, with Miles, wild-eyed and hysterical, running along the highway, banging on car windows, screaming, “They’re coming! They’re coming! You’re next!” Instead, we get the sequence at the hospital, which includes a ludicrous deus ex machina moment in which all the authorities are given reason to suddenly believe Miles and run to the phones to call the FBI. It tacks on an unearned sense of hope that the invasion will be stemmed, but more disastrously, it undercuts the film’s successful bid to alienate us from our reliance on legal and social systems as a source of salvation. In the end, a film that made us fear literally everything suddenly wants us to have faith that none other than the FBI will make everything right. It’s par for the Eisenhower-era course and not out of keeping with other science fiction films of its era (see, for example, 1954’s giant-ant thriller Them!), but its enforced existence gives the film’s ending, which could have been a truly nihilistic freak-out, a sense of optimism that just feels wrong.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 4K Uktra HD + Blu-ray

Aspect Ratio1.85:1 / 2.00:1
AudioEnglish DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 monural
SubtitlesEnglish
Supplements
  • Audio commentary by actors Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter and filmmaker Joe Dante
  • Audio commentary by film historian Richard Harland Smith
  • Audio commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson
  • Audio commentary by professor and film scholar Jason A. Ney
  • “The Fear is Real” video interview with filmmakers Larry Cohen and Joe Dante
  • “The Stranger in Your Lover’s Eyes” two-part visual essay with actor and son of director Don Siegel, Kristoffer Tabori, reading from his father’s book A Siegel Film
  • “I No Longer Belong: The Rise and Fall of Walter Wanger” interview with film scholar and author Matthew Bernstein
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • DistributorKino Lorber
    Release DateJuly 16, 2024

    COMMENTS
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers makes its 4K debut on Kino Lorber’s new dual-disc release, which features a new 4K scan “of the best available 35mm elements,” which I imagine refers to multiple 35mm prints since the original camera negative has been long lost. The 2160p/HDR Dolby Vision image offers a definite improvement over previous Blu-ray releases, with stronger detail and sharper contrast (although the film still has a slightly soft look that is inherent to the image). It is not dramatically different, but it is noticeable at times and makes for an all-around improved viewing experience even though there are clear changes in quality at times owing to the different sources. The image is also virtually flawless, with no signs of age or wear. Kino also includes two aspect ratio options: the 2.00:1 SuperScope aspect ratio and the more conventional 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The SuperScope aspect ratio is technically accurate since it reproduces the theatrical viewing experience (that is, this is how audiences saw it in theaters in 1956); however, as most know, the film was shot for 1.85:1, but Allied Artists insisted at the last minute on the wider aspect ratio (which involved zooming in on the full-frame 1.33:1 negative, which actually results in a softer image). Thus, the wider aspect ratio actually makes some shots, especially close-ups, feel like they are cropped too tightly. The film has been released on various home video formats over the years in both aspect ratios, and some releases have also included a 1.33:1 presentation, which just crops off the sides of the widescreen presentations since the original open-matte negative doesn’t exist anymore. Included the 2.00:1 and 1.85:1 presentations is the best approach here, as it gives us both how the film was originally presented theatrically and how it should have been presented. I much prefer the 1.85:1 presentation, since it adheres to the original intention and, frankly, looks much better in terms of framing and space. The 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio two-channel monaural soundtrack also sounds has good clarity and decent spaciousness. The gurgly, popping sound effects of the pods cracking open have never sounded better or grosser.

    Kino’s release includes a good chunk of the supplementary material that appeared on the now-defunct Olive Films’ “Signature” edition, some of which was originally intended for a Paramount special edition DVD that was commissioned for release back in 2006 but was cancelled (those “missing” supplements had been long-rumored and didn’t surface until Olive’s Blu-ray release in 2018). Kino also includes two new audio commentaries: one by film historians and Kino regular collaborators Steve Mitchell (King Cohen) and Nathaniel Thompson (head of the review site Mondo Digital) and one by film scholar Jason A. Ney, a professor at Colorado Christian University who has written extensively on film noir and has recorded a number of commentaries for previous Kino releases. Both new commentaries offer a wealth of information and insight, although much of it will be familiar to long-time fans of the film (really—is there any new information left to turn up about his beloved sci-fi classic?). The rest of the supplements previously appeared on Olive’s 2018 disc, including two information-rich and highly entertaining audio commentaries. The first, by film historian Richard Harland Smith, a long-time staff writer for Turner Classic Movies and Video Watchdog, was commissioned specifically for Olive’s release, while the second, recorded by actors Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter and filmmaker Joe Dante, was recorded in 2006 for the cancelled Paramount DVD. Also from Olive’s disc is “The Stranger in Your Lover’s Eyes,” a two-part visual essay with director Don Siegel’s son, Kristoffer Tabori, reading excerpts from Siegel’s 1993 autobiography A Siegel Film (Criterion offered a similar supplement on their 2014 Blu-ray of Siegel’s Riot in Cell Block 11). “The Fear is Real” (12 min.) is a featurette in which filmmakers Larry Cohen and Joe Dante ruminate on the film’s cultural legacy. And “I No Longer Belong: The Rise and Fall of Walter Wanger” (21 min.) is an extended interview with film scholar Matthew Bernstein, author of Walter Wanger: Film Independent. Unfortunately, quite a number of supplements from the Olive disc have been left off, including the featurettes “Sleep No More: Invasion of the Body Snatchers Revisited” and “The Fear and the Fiction: The Body Snatchers Phenomenon,” an archival TV interview with Kevin McCarthy from 1985, the 8-part featurette “Return to Santa Mira,” the featurette “What’s in a Name?” that explores the film’s alternate titles, and a gallery of rare documents from the production.

    Copyright © 2024 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © Kino Lorber

    Overall Rating: (3.5)




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