Help! My Family is Insane!

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a thrilling, disturbing classic science fiction/alien film. It was originally based upon a three-part story written by Jack Finney that appeared in Colliers Magazine in 1954, and then in 1955 was rendered into an expanded novel, The Body Snatchers. The screenplay, written by Daniel Mainwaring was aided, according to some sources, with uncredited scriptwriting by Sam Peckinpah. A quintessential, black and white B-picture, it was precisely-executed and packed with action by director Don Siegel, plus a scary musical score from Carmen Dragon. The subtle, low-budget film is very effective in eliciting horror even though there are no monsters, minimal special effects, no violence, and no deaths.

The film was re-made twice: (1) Philip Kaufman's adaptation Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams (and featuring cameo roles by Kevin McCarthy and Don Siegel) and set in San Francisco and nearby Mill Valley, and (2) Abel Ferrara's The Body Snatchers (1994) - the book's original title - with Gabrielle Anwar, Meg Tilly and Forrest Whittaker, and set on a Southern military base.

The theme of the politicized film was open to varying interpretations, including paranoia toward a harmful ideology such as socialistic Communism or the sweeping paranoic mass hysteria of McCarthyism in the 1950s and blacklisting of Hollywood, the spread of an unknown malignancy or virulent germ, or the numbing of our individuality and emotional psyches through conformity and group-think. Yet its main theme was the alien dehumanizing and take-over of an entire community by large seed pods (found in basements, automobile trunks, a greenhouse, and on a pool table) that replicated and replaced human beings. And the heroic struggle of one helpless but determined man of conscience, a small-town doctor (McCarthy), to combat and quell the deadly, indestructible threat.

This relentlessly haunting film received no Academy Award nominations. The prologue and its unconvincing matching epilogue were not in the original shooting of the film and tacked on, due to studio demands, to provide a more hopeful ending. The studio-imposed footage was removed in the 1979 re-issue.

In the exciting opening prologue with extended narration, dishevelled physician Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), distraught and seeming to be psychotic and mad about alien invaders, shouts to the unbelieving nurses, interns and doctors in the emergency room of the city's (San Francisco) Emergency Hospital where he has been brought:


Doctor, will you tell these fools? I'm not crazy. Make them listen to me before it's too late.

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