Retrospective Film Review

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) • 65 Years Later

A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.

Shortly before the long chase sequence that leads Invasion of the Body Snatchers to its climax, Dr Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and his recently reacquired girlfriend Becky (Dana Wynter) watch warily through the window of his medical office in downtown Santa Mira, California. In the town square below, citizens silently converge, coming together in a shared mission that threatens to destroy Kevin and Becky, the town, and likely the world. They’re tidy and efficient but unmistakably resemble zombies in their single-minded purpose.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was “the first postwar horror film to locate the monstrous in the normal”, as horror and sci-fi film historian Barry Keith Grant wrote, and those abnormal townsfolk in the square typify it. Don Siegel’s film is not generally one where specific events are terrifying-not even when a replicant woman is found vampire-like in a large box from which…