Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) is a fun movie and a bonafide sci-fi/horror classic for the resonance of its premise alone. A group of friends notice some people acting odd in their California town, then find a strange humanoid drone body that turns out to be the result of alien seeds that drifted through space and grew pods that create lookalike bodies of humans and replace them. The doppelgangers duplicate every cell and even the memories of the infected, but they lack human emotions. The more observant people start realizing their loved ones aren’t themselves, but nobody believes them.

It’s just such a timelessly unsettling idea – sensing that something isn’t quite right, not being able to convince anybody, even questioning it yourself, until you realize it’s a massive conspiracy. The one thing maybe creepier than finding an unfinished clone unconscious in your basement or greenhouse – what in the holy fuck!? – is seeing people gather in a parklet to distribute truckloads of pods for infiltrating the surrounding locales. They’ve taken over enough of the town that they’re comfortable doing this out in the open now.

In the prologue Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy, GHOULIES III: GHOULIES GO TO COLLEGE) is one of the few to escape, trying to warn the rest of the world. The movie is framed as his explanation of what led him to this moment. It started when he rushed home to Santa Mira from a medical convention with a backlog of patients anxious to see him. Then none of them show up for their appointments.

But he sees his old college girlfriend Becky (Dana Wynter, THE RETURN OF IRONSIDE) for the first time in five years, and she says her cousin Wilma (Virginia Christine, Mrs. Olson in the Folgers commercials) has a delusion that her dad (Tom Fadden, PARADISE ALLEY) isn’t her dad. Soon he hears other cases of people swearing a family member is an imposter. A kid named Jimmy (Bobby Clark) doesn’t want Grandma (Beatrice Maude, DODSWORTH) to take him home to Mom. Miles immediately gives him some pills.

My wife had to explain to me that the conversation about them both having been to Reno recently means they’re freshly divorced. I don’t know if not stating it directly is a censor thing or good writing. It works well for the love story part of the movie that they’re long acquainted and know each other well but also the flirtation is new to them.

When they go to their favorite restaurant Sky Terrace it’s strangely empty. “It’s been this way for two or three weeks now,” they’re told. It’s kinda nice, actually – the peaceful side of a body snatcher invasion. Except before their drinks are even poured Miles gets an emergency call from a writer friend, Jack (King Donovan, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN). You see, Jack and his wife Teddy (Carolyn Jones, EATEN ALIVE) found a strange body on their pool table. We don’t see it that clearly at first, but we hear it described. “His face, Miles, it’s vague. It’s like the first impression that’s stamped on a coin. It isn’t finished.”

The thing has no fingerprints. The good news is Jack and Teddy have an amazing home bar, so they’re able to get those drinks they didn’t get back at the Sky Terrace. In fact Miles sips his standing over and discussing the mysterious alien plant body. I respect it.

Obviously some of these old horror movies have people acting in ways that can seem silly even compared to the ways they act in modern horror movies. You just gotta roll with it. So yes, these people are unusually calm considering the bizarre mystery at hand. But it’s a nice gesture that they respect Miles’ knowledge and judgment enough that they call him for advice. He tells Jack to stay up watching it and “if nothing happens by morning, call the police.”

But something happens. They get freaked out when Teddy notices the body grows a cut on his hand matching one that Jack gets from breaking a glass. So they wake up Miles but what the fuck is he gonna do about it? Just suddenly panic when he suspects (correctly) that Becky is in trouble. He drives over there in such a hurry that he pulls up, doesn’t put the brake on and somehow exits out the passenger door (!?).

He finds a fake Becky growing in the cellar and runs upstairs to the real one, carries her away without even fully waking her up.

They figure calling the cops will be a waste of time, but Miles calls one that he personally knows. When Dan (Larry Gates, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT) comes to see the body at Jack’s house it has disappeared. He comes up with a bunch of dumb theories to explain why they thought they saw what they saw. Not that I blame him. It seems pretty far-fetched.

There’s a scene where Miles thinks he thinks he hears something in the cellar, and it’s just Charlie the gas man – Sam Peckinpah, not yet a director. He was the dialogue coach for the movie and four others by Siegel.

While some of the human behavior seems corny by modern standards, the FX seem more modern than I expect from the era. Miles notices a pulsating, foaming plant in Jack’s greenhouse. It pops open and plops out some slimy, lumpy parts. That’s how the bodies are grown. The friends endure the horrifying experience of discovering their own duplicates and needing to destroy them. Teddy asks “Is that me?” about a body her husband’s holding a pitchfork over. There’s a quick but probly shocking for 1956 shot of Miles stabbing the copy of himself in the chest.

The aforementioned scene where they watch out a window as truckfuls of pods are passed out to representatives of all the surrounding towns is a classic. There’s like a hundred people there, the cops have it all organized, it’s one of those creepy I’m-not-supposed-to-be-seeing-this moments but nobody acts like they’re being sinister. Might as well be setting up for a church picnic.

Another timelessly upsetting part is seeing some of our heroes succumb and suddenly change their tune about everything. Intergalactic sell outs. Telling Miles they were wrong before, they get it now. “Don’t fight it Miles, it’s no use. Sooner or later you’ll have to go to sleep.”

When they say it they mean it literally – when the original falls asleep the copy can take over – but it’s a good metaphor too. Many years later we’ll have THEY LIVE’s “they live, we sleep” and SCHOOL DAZE’s “wake up!” and THE MATRIX’s version of waking up, but this is an earlier cinematic plea for us to stay woke. One of the titles Siegel suggested was SLEEP NO MORE.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS was written by mystery-novelist-turned-screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (OUT OF THE PAST), based on the story The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, originally serialized in Mr. Burns’ favorite magazine Collier’s. The credits call the movie WALTER WANGER’S INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, after the producer. Wanger was not the one who made Siegel add an optimistic ending against his wishes, but he did convince him to film it to make sure the studio would release the movie. They both wanted it to end on Miles screaming as the pod truck drives away.

I grew up hearing of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS as a cautionary tale either about McCarthyism or communism, so I was surprised when I heard a clip of Siegel talking about it on One Handshake Away, a podcast released this year that Peter Bogdanovich had been working on before he died. Each episode is based around interviews with filmmakers he recorded decades ago. In the second episode we hear Siegel defending his Elvis Presley western FLAMING STAR and lamenting that the King continuing to do his popular formula vehicles was a waste of his acting talent. “Making those pictures is a pod” is how he says it.

He goes on to explain why he considers INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS his “most important” movie. “I hide behind a facade of bad scripts and telling stories with no import, and I felt that this was a very important story, because I feel that the world is populated by pods, and I wanted to show it. I think so many people have no feeling about cultural things, and no feeling of pain, of sorrow, and I wanted to get it over, and I didn’t know the better way to get it over than in this particular film.”

“I think the world is sick, I think the pods are taking it over, that’s certainly true of the people here. The pod directors, and they had quite a few.”

I can only speculate what he meant by “cultural things,” and can’t pretend to understand exactly what life was like almost two decades before I was born. But I’m very interested in this idea that it’s not intended as the political allegory so many take it as so much as a cry against conformity and blandness.

I’m sure Seigel also hated McCarthyism. In 1946 he won a best documentary short Oscar for Hitler Lives, which warns about fascists in the U.S. “spreading a violent propaganda of race hatred and violence.” At the time of DIRTY HARRY and its controversy he told the New York Times, “I’m a liberal, I lean to the left.” He also said, “I’m a rebel. That’s why the young kids like my films. I’ve been fired from almost every place I’ve ever worked. I resent authority.” So he didn’t see himself as part of the establishment, even if it’s hard for me today to think of Miles – a respected doctor who never takes off his coat or tie even when chased up a dirt hill by a mob of aliens – as a representative of outsiders.

On the other hand, those two being divorcees was a little outside the mainstream. They weren’t the wholesome family men and women of the ‘50s sitcoms. And hey, I’m pretty sure Jack and Teddy are childless cat ladies. They have that bar, they’re living it up! And Jack is an artist, a writer of some kind. I’m not sure about this but I was wondering if maybe he’s a crime writer and those posters in his house are his book covers. I don’t think the pod version of him will be writing any more of those. Though it would be interesting to see how that would turn out. I wonder if pods even read books?

Imagine what Siegel would think of the people running the studios now, bloodless fuckfaces who could tell you all about tax break scams, the stock market and algorithms, but couldn’t make a semi-insightful comment about a movie they liked even if their portfolio depended on it. Yeah, we got “no feeling about cultural things” pods now, believe me. I’ll be sure not to fall asleep around them. Thanks for the metaphor, Don. Good job on DIRTY HARRY also.