Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978): The King of the Horror Remake (Review)

Arrow’s latest release and one of the highlights of the year’s home release calendar is 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It comes with the embarrassment of extra footage, interviews, and making-of videos. The Blu-ray also features a characteristic effort to bring the film into the 21^st century with a stunning presentation. The most immediate and defining facet of the Arrow Video experience is the box, and although the merits of art are the most subjective and open of all critical fields, I believe Nathanael Marsh’s work to be this year or any year’s best.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a ‘say what you see’ title if ever there was one. It’s also a sci-fi and horror archetype that can be found in an inordinate number of genre films, two recent examples of which are Slither and The World’s End. For the select few of you unfamiliar with this archetype it goes like this. Alien pores descend to Earth taking-over all life, systematically replacing everyone with an emotionless imitation. ‘Pod People’ is a term that affectionately used when discussing ‘Body Snatchers. As far as plot and character are concerned, this invasion focuses on San Francisco and Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright & Leonard Nimoy as they fight in what small ways they can.

Like Planet of the Apes, Philip Kaufman’s film is infamous for its final image. Spoiler culture has made it so that if you know how something ends people just not bother, ignorant of the fact that for any film whether its Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something else, the journey is just as important as the destination. Advice which suits ‘Body Snatchers to perfection, the whole film acts like a cat and mouse chase, relentlessly ratcheting up the tension with the release finally coming with that iconic final image.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers may not be a classically scary film, but that doesn’t make it any less of an effective horror/sci-fi. Paranoia is one of the basest human emotions making it obvious material for a film like this, nevertheless, the fact that the invaders look exactly the same as unaffected human’s plays up the whole trust issue inherent in making a paranoid concept tick. The pressure that these people are put under is extreme to the point where they cannot fall to sleep for the fear of being taken over.

Which is the other aspect of the horror; if you fall to sleep a replicated version will quickly sprout up from the ground and when the process is complete the original will cave in on itself. Making sleep such a colossal enemy works on a level where few horror films dare tread. Then there is the manifestation of the process, which is right out of the Cronenberg School of body horror. Admittedly, the dog face mutation is just plain silly, otherwise, this is horror built on the most solid of foundations.

Despite operating on a primal level, that is not the greatest feat in Kaufman’s work; the true successes can be found in the DNA of the film-making process. Cinematography through the lens of Scorsese collaborator (Taxi Driver & Raging Bull) Michael Chapman is vivid and the pace is played to perfection. There is no one scene or image in the entire 115 minutes running time that feels flabby or superfluous, every last frame says something about the story, develops a character or further compounds the terrifying threat. A success that is aided by Chapman’s cinematography of Charles Rosen’s production design and Doug Von Koss’s Set Work; together with Kaufmann’s direction all the elements are pulling together to create this masterwork of 1970s sci-fi.

Discussing each Arrow video release in any great detail seems like a redundant exercise, especially when they are all of a prodigious class. Like every other release, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an incredibly accomplished HD release of one of the all-time great sci-fi/horrors and one of the enduring examples of a great remake. The thing that makes this such an eminently adaptable property is all you ready need to do is change the location and the subtext of the invaders and your good to go. The subtext of this iteration is one of the more hotly debated.

Thanks for reading our late review of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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