Invasion of the Body Snatchers

“Dentists are the first to go,” jokes Donald Sutherland’s health inspector, unaware of how horribly right he is, in Philip Kaufman’s 70s update of the 1956 science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original film featured insidious 'pods,' parasitic plants that duplicated their human hosts, growing clone bodies in cellars and greenhouses before ruthlessly replacing their originals, reducing the humans to biological detritus in the process; it was a disturbing, paranoid metaphor for Communist infiltration in the McCarthy era.

Set 20 years after the original and dripping with post-Nixon subtext, Kaufman imagines the spread of pod eco-horror from small-town America to San Francisco’s uncanny metropolis. The city provides fertile ground for the cross-pollination of Vietnam’s biological violence, the distrust of authority post-Watergate and the ability of the military-industrial complex to methodically destroy human life by the hundreds of thousands. This is body horror at its most compelling.