They come from another world!

"Something is happening! Send your men of science quick!" The panic stricken cry went over the phone to Washington D. C. until the lines went dead!......

Incredible! Invisible! Insatiable!

Don Siegel's classic exercise in psychological science fiction has often been interpreted as a cautionary fable about the blacklisting hysteria of the McCarthy era. It can be read as a political metaphor or enjoyed as a fine low-budget suspense movie, and it works well either way. Kevin McCarthy stars as Miles Bennel, a doctor in the small California community of Santa Mira, where several patients begin reporting that their loved ones don't seem to be themselves lately. They look the same but seem cold, emotionally distant, and somehow unfamiliar. The longer Miles looks into these reports, the more stock he places in them, and in time he makes a shocking discovery: aliens from another world are taking over Santa Mira, one citizen at a time. Emissaries from a distant planet have sent massive seed pods containing creatures that can assume the exact physical likeness of anyone they choose. When Santa Mirans go to sleep, the pod creatures take on the shape of their victims and then destroy their bodies. The aliens may look the same, but they possess no human emotions and, like plants, are concerned only with propagating themselves and eventually subsuming the earth. Needless to say, Miles and his friends are terrified, but since it's hard to tell who's a person and who's a pod, they're at a loss for what to do, especially when it seems that there are increasingly more aliens than humans. Invasion of the Body Snatchers builds tension slowly and steadily, dealing not in the shock of bug-eyed monsters common to other 1950s science-fiction movies but in the unnerving possibility that the enemy is among us -- and impossible to tell from our allies. The ultra-paranoid conclusion of Siegel's original cut was softened by Allied Artists, who added a framing device that suggested help was on the way. This coda was as effective in blunting the film's grim conclusion as giving a Band-Aid to a beheading victim; few films of the era make it more painfully clear that for these people (and maybe for ourselves), there's no turning back and no way home. Keep an eye peeled for a bit part by soon-to-be-legendary Western director Sam Peckinpah, who plays a meter reader and also (uncredited) helped write the screenplay. Based on a novel by Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade in 1978 by Philip Kaufman and in 1993 by Abel Ferrara (as Body Snatchers); and its influence can be felt from The Stepford Wives (1975) to The X-Files.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 American black-and-white science fiction film directed by Don Siegel, starring Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, that was released through Allied Artists Picture Corporation. Daniel Mainwaring adapted the screenplay from Jack Finney's 1954 novel The Body Snatchers.[2]

The story depicts an extraterrestrial invasion of a small California town. The invaders replace human beings with duplicates that appear identical on the surface but are devoid of emotion or individuality. A local doctor uncovers what is happening and tries to stop them.[2]

In 1994 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

When the film was released domestically in February 1956, many theaters displayed several pods (made of papermache) in theater lobbies and entrances, along with large lifelike black and white cutouts of McCarthy and Wynter running away from a crowd. The film made more than $1 million in the first month, and in 1956 alone made more than $2.5 million in the U.S.[2] When the British release (with cuts imposed by the British censors[16]) took place in late 1956, the film earned more than a half million dollars in ticket sales

Largely ignored by critics on its initial run,[14] Invasion of the Body Snatchers received wide critical acclaim in retrospect and is considered one of the best films of 1956.[26][27][28] The film holds a 98% "Fresh" rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.[29] In recent years critics have hailed the film as a "genuine Sci-Fi classic" (Dan Druker, Chicago Reader),[30] "influential, and still very scary" (Leonard Maltin)[31] and one of the "most resonant" and "one of the simplest" of the genre (Time Out)


Release Date: February 1956


Distrib: Allied Artists