‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’: From Communist Hysteria in 1957 To A Zombie Hybrid in 2019.

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

The cinematic history of the adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ gives us a real insight into the anxieties pervading the society at the time in which it was turned into a movie and also shows us how a deflection of those anxieties can be achieved by reworking the original source material into something that we would define as a cultural hybrid.

Don Siegel made the first screen adaptation in 1957 when America and Russia had been in a Cold War for 10 years. The euphemism is itself as far removed and distant from the actual reality of the situation, as you can get. World War Three would have been hotter than any of the conceptions of Judeo-Christian hell you care to think of. However the idea of a ‘Cold War’ is a perfect description of the actual attempted takeover of the Earth by the alien spores.

The alien simulacra have no emotions whatsoever. They are cold. Whereas we humans are blistering hot in our emotional response to the Invasion and the replacement of all human life by our doppelgangers. The literary history of doppelgangers warns us already, that when we meet…