The Body Snatchers’ Latter Day Invasions

Jack Finney’s 1954 Novel 'The Body Snatchers' inspired two classic films in 1956 and 1978. The two that followed in 1993 and 2007 met rockier fates.

Like The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing, the two versions of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers used to serve as a kind of matched set. Both told the same story, or something like it, in strikingly different ways that reflected the eras in which they were created. Both could start an argument about the nature of their central metaphor. And, above all, both were excellent in their own right, modern classics recognized as such (though not without some dissent) in their own time. Adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers in which first a few, then many, pod people from outer space replace humanity as emotionless, hive mind-driven duplicates, just worked. Maybe, it seemed, it was the sort of story that could be revisited every couple of decades to offer chills and thrills while mirroring the fears of the times.

Then two more invasions took place that threw off that thinking, either by underperforming commercially or critically or both. What had once seemed like a sure thing started to look a little iffy.

Meg Tilly in ‘Body Snatchers’

What happened? Both Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers and the 2007 film The Invasion, a film with so many contributors it’s tough to assign directing or writing credit, offer their own twist on Finney’s story that reflect, in their own way, the ‘90s and ‘00s. The former barely got a release in early 1994 and the latter flamed out in full view of the public in 2007. But beyond disappointing at the box office (albeit on dramatically different scales), the resemblance between the two ends there.

It certainly doesn’t extend the films’ quality. Though it’s hard to make an argument that Body Snatchers can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its predecessors, it has much to recommend it, even if the weirdly wistful voiceover that opens the film doesn’t immediately suggest this. Those voiceover thoughts belong to Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar), a teen accompanying her family to a middle-of-nowhere army base where her father Steve’s (Terry Kinney) job investigating the place for the EPA is sure to make them misfits. Accompanying her are Marti’s stepmother Carol (Meg Tilly), whom she does not like, and stepbrother Andy (Reilly Murphy), whom she does. Marti’s already filled with misgivings even before she’s accosted by a knife-wielding soldier who warns her, “They get you when you sleep.”

Once on base, the Malones’ experience doesn’t get much more reassuring. Steve, predictably, isn’t welcomed warmly by the stern General Platt (R. Lee Ermey, doing what he did better than just about anyone else), though he’s greeted more sympathetically by Maj. Collins (Forest Whitaker), who has some concerns about the possible side effects of the toxin Steve’s investigating. Marti, at least, makes some friends in the form of the general’s rebellious daughter Jenn (Christine Elise) and a handsome helicopter pilot named Tim (Billy Wirth). Andy, on the other hand, first finds himself out of place as the only non-creepy kid in a classroom full of Village of the Damned types, then watches his mother’s body crumble into dust shortly before her naked duplicate emerges from the closet, a Freudian nightmare brought to life. Then things get even worse.