MGM and 20th Century Fox have released a deluxe,
2 DVD collector’s edition of the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It probably isn’t fair to call this
a remake, but rather a complimentary piece to director Don Siegel’s classic
1956 film. In fact, director Philip Kaufman makes it clear in an interview
included on the DVD that he doesn’t view this as a remake. You would have to
have been living in a cave for the last fifty years if you don’t know the
central premise of the story: that tiny organisms from a doomed planet have
come to earth and have unobtrusively imbedded themselves throughout the
population of a small town. When townspeople fall asleep, they are ultimately
replicated by the organisms that metamorphasize from a large pod into human
form. The result is that the new being retains the physical characteristics of
the person but in fact, they are a totally different being, devoid of most
human emotions. There has been much debate over the hidden implications of the
original storyline but director Don Siegel always denied that the script was a
metaphor for Sen. McCarthy’s tactics of stamping our individuality and dissent.
Siegel always maintained that the Cold War meanings attributed to the movie
were coincidental and that he only wanted to fashion an expertly-made chiller.
That he succeeded in doing so was largely born out by the fact that director
Philip Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter felt the original film was as
timely in 1978 as it was upon its initial release.