Although several scenes seemed to be lifted straight from my childhood nightmares, I wasn’t scared by the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers while watching it in the theatre. After I went to sleep that night though, that’s when it got to me. Scenes from the movie invaded my dreams, and when I woke up in the middle of the night I was almost afraid to go back to sleep, lest I be replaced by an alien vegetable doppelganger.
Unlike a lot of horror movies, there aren’t a lot of shocks or “gotchas” in this incarnation of Body Snatchers. Instead, it relies on those creeping feelings of dread and paranoia that I’m sure many children have felt while lying awake in bed – “What if the people I love suddenly stop loving me?” “What if I go to sleep and won’t ever wake up?” “What if evil takes over my whole town?” “What if I have to escape but there’s no where to run?”
Unlike this season’s other great horror film, Eraserhead, which took place in an abstract, dreamlike reality, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feels grounded in a specific time and place. Through a style that mixes German expressionism with New Hollywood grittiness, director Philip Kaufman places the invasion very clearly in late ‘70s San Francisco. This, combined with the way his characters feel like real people with jobs and dreams and not just fodder for the aliens, makes the film feel much more serious than its premise would indicate.
The three leads all face struggles that are related to the theme of being surrounded by imposters. Donald Sutherland plays a health inspector whose job it is to find the phonies in the restaurant world – early in the film he finds what a chef is claiming is a caper is actually a rat turd. His co-worker, played by Brooke Adams, is living with a boyfriend in a stale and emotionless relationship, a pale imitation of the genuine love she could have with Sutherland. And Jeff Goldblum is a writer who is distressed by how easily the public is swayed by books that have no heart to them while dismissing the work that he pours his soul into. W. D. Richter’s script highlights just how easily fake things can infiltrate and corrupt our reality.
When it moves out of the realm of social commentary into the nitty-gritty alien invasion stuff, the script doesn’t hold up quite as well. Aside from recurring shots of mysterious grey material being disposed of, the way the aliens work seems a bit illogical and inconsistent. In a lot of horror films it might not be as much of an issue, but the leaps of logic required to buy some of the mechanics of pod people don’t always mesh with Invasion’s general level of verisimilitude.
Fortunately, the special effects work is so outstanding, not to mention extremely disgusting, that it’s easy to forgive how outlandish the whole thing is. The scenes of pod people being born don’t make a lot of sense, but they are so stomach-churning nightmarish that it doesn’t matter. Ultimately though it’s the ideas behind Invasion of the Body Snatchers that make it disturbing. The damning final shot includes no visual effects at all, but it will stick with audiences long after they’ve managed to repress the memories of the more graphic and gory scenes.
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