Wasn't there talk at the time that the movie came out that it was subliminally about communism? I know they also mentioned the old saw about atomic radiation which was a staple of 50's horror movies.
This positively infantile preoccupation with bosoms!Terry-Thomas about US 1963.Hasnt changed much!
Yeah - they still look like us, but they've lost their souls/personalities to a foreign entity. Christian Nyby's The Thing from Another World (1951) is another one that is supposed to be in the same vein - we're threatened by hostile alien invasion, watch the skies.
Although I'm not so sure they were seen this way when they were made. I think that interpretation was first proposed in the 1970s.
That could be true. In any case, for a very long time up to now, the original has been thought of as a Cold War era "Red Scare", the fear of losing the Freedom of Individuality to a societal Collectivism, in that case such as to encroaching Communism on our own soil, in our own previously Free Nation, even enforced by our own government upon we citizens, whatwith the "alien" influence.
But like you, I don't know if that was the way anyone saw it when new in the mid-'50s, or if any of that had been intended by the writer(s) or not.
Hmm, could be, I guess...?
In the book Danse macabre Stephen King writes that he and J. Finney don't believe the movie has political undertones. It is easy to associate it with anti-communism, anti-left in its time of feverish cold war
Eternally walking...
I agree! If you read the novel, Finney explains where his inspiration came from~an occurrence in a city only about 30 miles north of this town! Finney was intrigued by the idea of mass hysteria.
I think the Communism thing is nonsense, as much as it is in "The Thing from Another World"! Yes, there was paranoia about "the Reds"; when I was in grade school, as we walked in the front door, there were two huge posters, both of Khrushchev and his shoe, declaring, "We will bury you!" Nice thing for the kiddies, right? But, to load it into movies in that period... I never once thought "Commies" in all of the 100+ times I've seen those movies; I am not exaggerating about the number of times I've watched them.
Flying saucers were in movies, on TV, in comics, in pulp magazines, and even on novelty records. "Watch the skies..." for THEM, not worldly menaces!
People should read Finney's novel before trying to hang the Red Scare on the film.
(W)hat are we without our dreams?
Making sure our fantasies
Do not overpower our realities. ~ RC
I think that it's blatantly obvious that the movie was a reference to Communism. It was made at the height of the Red Scare, a time when everyone was paranoid that any one of their last-person-you-would-least-suspect neighbors could turn Commie.
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Emojis=💩 Emoticons=
I wrote a short essay arguing that Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is an allegory for two competing visions of society: American individualism versus Soviet communism.
I thoroughly revised my essay today. If you would like to read it, here is the link:
https://christopherjohnlindsay.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers/
I see this film as more a warning about the horrors of caving in to basic societal pressure to conform to a banal and repressive mass collective mindset. This film makes a profound and powerful point that it's our capacity for feeling all sorts of emotions and desire to be individuals that make us all special and human. If deprived of these two key human traits, we are reduced to the level of bland and unfeeling automatons.
I've been chasing grace/ But grace ain't easy to find
I think the fear of everyone turning into lifeless creepy shells of human beings goes deeper than fears of totalitarianism, I think it expresses a subconscious fear of losing relationships and connection, the fear of being cast out by the community, of becoming the outsider through not fault of your own.
I used to have dreams about situations like this, where everyone around me turned into shambling nonentities one by one. Although it's true that I grew up sneaking out of bed to watch late-night cheesy horror and sci-fi films, so while that sort of weirdness may be in my subconscious it might not be in everyone's.
In addition to the original author Jack Finney saying he intended nothing politically specific, director Don Spiegel said that he also didn't intend to comment on Communism, but was well aware while they were making it that some people would take it that way.
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