Abel Ferrara’s sci-fi horror Body Snatchers was largely overlooked in 1993, but it’s aged remarkably well in the decades since.
Movie-goers and film scholars have argued for decades over which side of the political divide director Don Siegel and his collaborators fell on when they made Invasion Of The Body Snatchers at the height of the Cold War in 1956. Did it tap into contemporary fears of an insidious communist takeover, or was it a Crucible-like jab at McCarthyist witch hunts?
Siegel always maintained that he didn’t have politics in mind when he made the film, adapted from author Jack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers; he simply intended it to be an entertaining, disturbing thrill ride. And what a thrill-ride it is: starring Kevin McCarthy as a small-town doctor who’s slow to realise his patients – and gradually the entire town – is being replaced by soulless pod people – it’s a tense, paranoid collision of sci-fi and film noir.
When director Philip Kaufman moved the story from small town California to post-Watergate San Francisco with his 1978 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, the wryly cynical result was as acclaimed as its predecessor. With captivating performances from its leads – Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum – and a thrillingly tense atmosphere, it became a gripping story about urban alienation and the solipsism of the post-hippy era.
Compared to the first two, 1993’s Body Snatchers is often regarded as something of a disappointment. Short at less than 90 minutes long (including a lengthy opening credits sequence) there were signs that it had been compromised somewhat by its studio, Warner Bros; reviews were lukewarm, and its director, the New York maverick Abel Ferrara, later expressed his dissatisfaction with it.
Over 30 years on, however, Body Snatchers stands up remarkably well; it may be a level below the first two movies, but it emerges with a style, tone and set of themes all of its own.
The most obvious point of difference between the 1993 Body Snatchers and its predecessors is its change in setting. A chemist for the Environmental Protection Agency, Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) moves with his family and a car stuffed with belongings to a US Air Force base in Alabama, with Steve despatched to analyse soil and water samples for signs of contamination – the base doubling as a storage facility for assorted chemical weapons.
Body Snatchers isn’t told from Steve’s perspective, however, but rather his teenage daughter, Marti (Gabrielle Anwar). It’s a marked change from the previous two movies, which were exclusively seen from the viewpoint of level-headed (if occasionally neurotic) grownups. It immediately places Ferrara’s film in the realm of the coming of age story, with Marti kicking against the constraints of a dysfunctional family unit: she barely talks to her stepmother, Carol (Meg Telly); constantly argues with her father, and initially seems somewhat ambivalent towards her half-brother, Andy (Reilly Murphy).
The story begins in the back of Steve’s car, and the narration, woozy score and narration give the opening a diffuse, dreamlike quality. What follows could even be seen as a teenager’s nightmare (or perhaps wish fulfilment fantasy), as Marti falls in love with an older, edgily handsome pilot Tim (Billy Wirth, the film’s weak link in terms of acting) and sees the family she resents disintegrate in the face of a quiet invasion.
Visually, Body Snatchers is frequently stunning; it’s a sign of how flat modern films often look, in fact, that what was considered at the time a somewhat so-so genre piece now stands out so sharply. The soldiers on the army base are shown in dehumanising silhouettes or ominous long shots where their faces are somehow obscured; the implication being that they’re a kind of regimented hive mind before the invasion even begins.
The imagery only improves as the conspiracy deepens: a sequence where a classroom of kids all paint the exact same painting with fingers dipped in crimson paint is a standout. Then there’s Meg Tilly’s brilliant performance, as she flips from loving wife to icy pod person (her baritone delivery of, “Where you gonna go…” becomes the film’s unforgettable refrain).
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When Body Snatchers came out, some critics complained that its practical effects showed less imagination than the 1978 version, and they may have had a point. In retrospect, the pods’ noodle-like tendrils look quite unsettling – certainly more so than the digital appendages of, say, Species, released two years later. (It’s arguable that even average 1990s practical effects have aged better than most early attempts at CGI.)
Body Snatchers is so precisely staged and shot that the editing becomes one of its more perplexing features; a 1991 script, written by Stuart Gordon (who was once in line to direct) and polished by Ferrara regular Nicholas St John, runs to around 120 pages, which might imply that there’s around half an hour of missing footage somewhere. In reality, the 84-minute final cut isn’t markedly different from what was on the page – for reasons unclear, it was seemingly decided that everything in the plot had to be cut right down to the knuckle in order to quicken the pace. The most glaring difference is that a scene-setting conversation in the opening scene is replaced by a brief narration from Anwar – again, a seeming attempt to get the plot to the invasion scenes more quickly.
The ending has also been simplified, with a late action sequence cut down to a montage of explosions – possibly because the production didn’t have the budget to realise what was on the page.
It’s interesting to note, though, that some of the quirks in the movie are also in the script. Forest Whitaker’s fractious Major Collins, introduced in the first act, feels as though he ought to be one of those secondary characters who pops up from time to time, much like Marti’s wayward friend and general’s daughter, Jenn (Christine Elise). Instead, he isn’t seen again until the final reel, by which time less attentive viewers may have forgotten who Whitaker’s character actually is.
This writer’s assumption was that Major Collins once had a bigger role that was subsequently cut down, but if the 1991 script’s anything to go by, this was never the case. The same’s true of R Lee Ermey, star of another film about military dehumanisation, Full Metal Jacket; his glowering General Platt only appears in a scene or two.
The making of Body Snatchers was evidently punctuated by creative differences. Ferrara, having recently made the acclaimed and spectacularly violent independent films The King Of New York and Bad Lieutenant, was hired to make his first studio movie at some point in 1991. Clearly, the filmmaker’s experience at Warner Bros wasn’t a happy one.
Years later, Ferrara said that the concept of setting Body Snatchers on an army base was already in place when he joined the production – and it wasn’t one he particularly approved of. “We started our film, already we’re far enough into the script where Warner Bros already had the idea of strangers in a military camp,” Ferrara told me in 2015. “You couldn’t come up with a worse place or a worse starting point for that film.”
Ferrara’s dislike of the concept was such that he tried to push through an alternative script that returned to the small town setting of author Jack Finney’s original novel and its first adaptation. “We did the best we could; without telling the guys at Warner Bros, I was holding onto the original story, minus the narration,” Ferrara said, adding that he’d even spoken to Finney, asking for his input on the script. “Jack was really cool, very helpful, just what you’d expect. Then I got a call from the Warner Bros guys saying, ‘Don’t talk to that guy, because, like he basically got $500, and that’s all he’s gonna fuckin’ get, and we don’t want him asking for more.’ So that ended that conversation.”
The filmmaker therefore had little choice than to continue with the army base premise, which producer Robert H Solo – who also produced the 1978 movie – had come up with years earlier white shooting a movie called Blue Sky (shot in 1990, it wasn’t released until 1994).
Ferrara later suggested that the location shooting – in Selma, Alabama – was far enough away from Hollywood to avoid interference from studio executives; it was during the editing process, he recalled, that more creative differences emerged.
“We had a lot of money and we were out in the middle of nowhere, so it was in the editing that it went south,” Ferrara said. “Dede Allen was a really talented editor at Warners, in charge of all the editing for all the films. I mean, I butted heads, because I don’t like anybody telling me what to do. But, you know, we had a pretty good editor ourselves [Anthony Redman].”
For Ferrara, Body Snatchers was something of a compromise; in 2015, he said that although he likes the resulting movie, he’d considered remaking it again – this time with the small town setting he wanted in the early 90s. “Yeah, absolutely [I’d remake it],” Ferrara said. “The doctor in the small town somewhere. Why change that? It’s brilliant. If you’ve got a great reason for changing it, then yeah. But if you’ve got an arbitrary reason? You’re gonna make a $40m film on some arbitrary, dopey-ass fuckin’ chase some idiot screenwriter made – that was fired anyway? That’s it in a nutshell.”
For reasons unclear, Warner Bros barely gave Body Snatchers a cinema release. It was shown at Cannes in 1993 and then screened in a handful of cinemas the following January – long considered a graveyard slot for theatrical releases – before heading off to VHS and television.
Gradually, however, Body Snatchers has gained a cult following, and a quick search of YouTube will uncover numerous videos that argue in its favour. Certainly, Ferrara’s film looks like a masterpiece compared to The Invasion – director Olivier Hirschbiegel’s calamitous take on the material from 2007. (Of that film, Ferrara said in 2015, “Do I think I could do a better [remake] than these clowns did with [The Invasion]? I haven’t seen all of it, but I’ve seen enough…”)
In its brisk duration, Body Snatchers still gets to the core of what made Jack Finney’s book and its earlier adaptations so effective: the idea that our friends, neighbours, even our own bodies, could be replaced by emotionless simulacra. Whether it’s used as a metaphor for the spread of communist ideology, the disintegration of the family unit (something YouTuber Georg Rockall-Schmidt has argued), or the degrading impact of America’s military industrial complex, it speaks to a primal, almost indescribable fear that cuts deeper than politics.
The fear of being somehow replaced has formed the basis of all kinds of racist conspiracy theories, ones that have hung around like a toxic cloud on society’s fringes for decades. Producer Robert H Solo noted this in a 1994 interview with Starlog magazine.
“It’s something people can relate to… We’re just pawns, and ‘they’ are taking over,” Solo said. “In a way, you can see some of that in the contemporary politics of the Far Right – ‘they’ are taking over, and ‘we’ are being wiped out and taken over by them, whoever ‘them’ are.’
What Solo said next, about people’s sense of powerlessness in the face of change, as livelihoods vanish and the gap between rich and poor widens, remains as true today as it did 30 years ago:
“There are always people who feel a kind of alienation and powerlessness, where their lives are being run by unseen others. That’s what touched a chord in all three movies. That’s why people feel it in a kind of visceral way, and that’s why the films work. We can relate to the people involved, and things aren’t the way they used to be. ‘Something’s happening and life isn’t the way it used to be. I’m not living as well as my parents did. What’s going on here? Our factories are closing. Who’s doing this? They are!’ I’m not saying this film is a metaphor for that, but that’s an aspect of the Body Snatchers’ MacGuffin that I think touches people.”
Solo’s observation is arguably why these stories still resonate all these years later. The Don Siegel and Philip Kaufman films are arguably among the best genre films of their respective decades. Abel Ferrara’s take, although less assured in its pacing and acting, still captures enough of the source material’s paranoid essence to make it a minor classic in its own right.
It’s ironic, really, that the deal Finney made all those years ago earned him so little – just $500, as Ferrara pointed out. With The Body Snatchers, the author came up with an idea so potent that, in the hands of the right filmmakers, it can be remade over and over again, revealing new facets and new fears each time.
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