What We Fear From the ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’
In 1954, it was a novel. Now it’s a handful of films. Still scary?
Jack Finney was an American novelist, and his famous story, The Body Snatchers, is archetypally American. In a culture that so heavily promotes individualism, the ultimate terror is losing one’s own personality.
The Book
In Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers, alien seed pods fall to earth and sprout plants that quickly mature. While a human is asleep, the plant produces an emotionless clone of the human body and then destroys the original body. It is impossible to distinguish a clone from the original, except that something is behaviorally amiss: a clone shows no facial expressions and takes no interest in anything other than the task in front of it. The clones seem to have no purpose except to cultivate more seed pods to grow more of their kind. They communicate with each other swiftly and ruthlessly through unseen channels. Their goal is world domination. Occasionally, they attempt to verbally justify this by explaining that they are relieving humanity of its suffering.
The Movies
Finney’s novel was quickly made into a sci-fi film, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), which spawned a color remake of the same name in…
