By Michael Walsh

Few science fiction horror films capture the pure essence of paranoia quite like the ones that make a valiant effort to tell the body snatching story first written by Jack Finney.

While Don Siegel’s 1956 version of Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers is quite possibly the best film to tell the story of an alien race that goes about its world domination without metal spaceships and with flowers, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 update holds a much more special place in my heart for a number of reasons.

Although I do love the small-town setting Siegel’s film takes place on, Kaufman moves Finney’s tale of paranoia and identity pandemic to the big city, making the takeover’s initial location San Francisco, a delectable setting for any genre film of the 1970’s.

The film features some serious star power, placing Donald Sutherland in a lead role as a public health worker, Jeff Goldblum as his paranoid friend and Leonard Nimoy as a know-it-all author and psychologist. The female leads are played by the recognizable but lesser-known Brooke Adams and Veronica Cartwright. Between the strength of these five actors, a great sense of paranoia begins circulating early on in the film, as suspicions rise about people who simply aren’t themselves anymore.

What makes Invasion of the Body Snatchers such a treat is sensational sense of paranoia it instills in the viewer, let alone the characters, and how Kaufman so effectively portrays it and pushes it.

“I keep seeing these people, all recognizing each other,” says Adams’ character Elizabeth as she suspects something has changed in San Francisco. “Something is passing between them all, some secret. It’s a conspiracy, I know it.”

This line puts the entire journey in perspective. It summarizes the entire feel and atmosphere of the film. The emotionless duplicate bodies that walk amongst our main characters lack human quality and a sense of uniqueness, yet they communicate so well, almost without a whisper. All human character and identity is lost once the pods take control and birth out a new body absolutely the same as the old one.

Kaufman’s film is delightfully eerie, a true champion of the science fiction horror genre that a very few succeed at. Filming most of its climax at night, Kaufman makes use of shadows and the unknown during running chase scenes across a freaked out San Francisco.

A most remarkable and memorable shot places the camera across the street from our main characters as they try to run away from a group of impostor human beings hoping to change them into emotionless facades of themselves. In this shot, we see giant shadows of the four projected onto the building they run alongside, creating suspense through a simple static shot with a beautiful  eye for aesthetics.

This version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers also has another one-up on Siegel’s already great attempt to tell the story. Forget the technical advancements that allow Kaufman to film his story in grander scope and vibrant color, the team at work here also gets the opportunity to work with some top notch special effects (for the time) that will undoubtedly creep the hell out of you.

There’s a dog with a man’s head, and that’s hardly the epitome of disgusting creature effects Body Snatchers features. The detail of the undead yet dead looking bodies and the pods they grow out of is remarkable to not only the look, but to the touch, and adds a whole heck of a lot to capturing the uneasy feeling the rest of the film strives so hard to attain.

Additionally, Kaufman’s film is home to a few of the most memorable moments in 1970’s cinema. The entire chase sequences is full of emotionless beings screeching at the top of their lungs with unhuman sounds coming from their open mouths and fingers pointing straight at you while they attempt to identify those who haven’t ‘turned’ yet. The film’s ending is shocking and one of the most well-done and well-executed in the genre, something I can only let you discover on your own.

Terrifying for more reasons than just the same old movie scare tactics, Invasion of the Body Snatchers brings forward real concepts of paranoia, that while achieved through unbelievable action of alien infusion via a new species of plant, can be taken as allegory for all sorts of real life paranoia we might have for brain-altering people of certain religions or belief groups.

This story has been told many times, most recently in the Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman film The Invasion. Before that, the story was told on a military base in 1993’s Body Snatchers. And while the original film adaptation is among the era’s most remarkable science fiction films, the 1978 Kaufman production has that extra push that allows the film to most certainly appeal to all those interested in otherworldly exploration.