Before Pluribus, there was author Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers: a concept so brilliant, it has inspired writers for over 70 years. “The original. The Wellspring. The granddaddy of them all.” So wrote showrunner Vince Gilligan on Letterboxd in late 2025, as he listed the films that inspired his new series, Pluribus. The granddaddy he ... Pluribus, and the timeless brilliance of the Body Snatchers concept
Before Pluribus, there was author Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers: a concept so brilliant, it has inspired writers for over 70 years.
“The original. The Wellspring. The granddaddy of them all.”
So wrote showrunner Vince Gilligan on Letterboxd in late 2025, as he listed the films that inspired his new series, Pluribus. The granddaddy he was referring to was Invasion Of The Body Snatchers – the 1956 sci-fi thriller whose quiet takeover concept informed the basis of Gilligan’s latest show.
Directed by Don Siegel, The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a genre masterpiece. It’s coiled and suspenseful where so many sci-fi films of its era were loud and overwrought. Completely absent of flying saucers and other staples of the 50s, it’s as much a noir thriller as a work of science fiction: a prowling account of a small town doctor who sees his entire community swept up by a silent threat. One by one, the populace are replaced by benign-seeming yet ultimately soulless replicas – all hatched out of plant-like pods.
Body Snatchers certainly wasn’t the only work to explore this kind of concept – humans were replaced by dastardly aliens in Invaders From Mars, It Came From Outer Space (both 1953), and Robert A Heinlein’s 1951 novel, The Puppet Masters. But the strength of Body Snatchers’ ideas, and believability of its storytelling, has seen it remade no fewer than three times over the past 70 years – and that’s without counting the films that inspired it, including The Faculty (1998) and, again, Pluribus.
Director Philip Kaufman moved the story over the bay from the fictional Santa Mira to the bustling streets of San Francisco for 1978’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Abel Ferrara transposed the concept to a military base in 1993’s Body Snatchers. Oliver Hirschbiegel replaced the pods with a mind-altering virus in 2007’s poorly-received The Invasion.
And while Pluribus isn’t an official remake, Vince Gilligan’s show finds its own spin on the Body Snatchers theme. An alien virus, decoded from a radio transmission, sweeps across the planet, turning the population into an interconnected, singular hive mind. All except a dozen people, who have a natural immunity to the virus; among them protagonist Carol (Rhea Seehorn), a grumpy, boozy romance novelist who’s disturbed to find herself surrounded by a smiling collective who radiate peace and love.
There’s one name we haven’t mentioned here yet, and it’s one that for years pop culture has had a tendency to overlook for decades: author Jack Finney, who wrote the novel on which these movies was based.
A writer who largely avoided media attention over the course of his long career, Finney started out as an advertising copywriter before turning his hand to short stories in the 1940s. He moved to Mill Valley, California in the early 1950s, and by this point his work was starting to get noticed; his 1954 thriller Five Against The House was adapted into a movie the following year.
It was around this time that the seed that grew into The Body Snatchers was first planted. Before the concept of the invasion, or the pods, or spores from space, Finney first thought about the topic of community, and the rural town in which he lived. It was exactly the kind of place where something dreadful could happen without the rest of the country being any the wiser.
“It seemed kind of horrible,” Finney told The Washington Post in 1994, “as well as fresh and original, that someone in your household – your wife, your brother, somebody – looks exactly the same, speaks exactly the same, has the same everything, and yet isn’t the same.”
Although the original versions of the story called the town Santa Mira, the community in The Body Snatchers was closely modeled on Mill Valley – the kind of place where doctors are on first-name terms with their patients. Its protagonist, Miles Bennell, is a 28 year-old GP with long term roots in the town; he’s inherited a house from his late parents (his father was also a doctor), and having recently divorced, he hooks up with a high school sweetheart, Becky.
When Becky’s young cousin begins to insist that her uncle isn’t really her uncle anymore, Miles and his colleagues initially put it down to delusion; when more people come forward saying their loved ones have somehow changed, it’s dismissed as mass hysteria. But then a writer friend of Miles’, Jack, finds a humanoid body in his house – a kind of unfinished replica that is still awaiting the final details to be added…
First published in Colliers magazine in 1954, The Body Snatchers was issued as a novel one year later – right around the time Hollywood came calling. Produced by Walter Wanger and adapted by screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, the resulting Invasion was a hardly an A-movie – the budget was a relatively lean $350,000 (which later overran slightly to just over $380,000). The studio behind it, Allied Artists, despite dabbling in big-budget films (including Billy Wilder’s Love In The Afternoon) was best known for making cost-effective genre pieces.
Nor was the resulting movie an immediate smash; the story goes that, on its release in 1956, the studio struggled to get Hollywood critics to even write a review of it.
All of which explains why Finney was paid comparatively little for The Body Snatchers’ rights. According to that 1994 Washington Post piece, Finney received $7,500 for his work; the contract he signed, however, also meant he’d also signed the story over “exclusively and forever.” The author couldn’t have known at the time just how popular his story would become; or that it would be remade so many times.
“I don’t know who owns the rights anymore,” Finney said in 1994, “but a hell of a lot of money has been made over the years by someone.”
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers remains remarkably true to Finney’s book for much of its duration; the character names, situations and slow-burn suspense are all more or less the same. The concept of the pods being feather-light spores, blown through space like so many tumbleweeds, was left out, however, as was the book’s briefly touched-on idea that the alien pods may also be able to mimic inanimate objects as well as people.
The biggest change came at the end. In the book, the invaders are described as a locust-like force that drifts from planet to planet, stripping all life before moving on. And like insects, the pod people have a short life span (in this case, five years) and are comparatively frail.
Rather implausibly, Miles and Becky mount a fiery counter-offensive on farmland packed with growing pods one night – an act that forces the invaders to conclude that conquering humanity is more trouble than it’s worth. The spores then float off into space to find a new, less wily world to assimilate.
Don Siegel and his collaborators came up with something altogether more bracing: the town is taken over, Becky (Dana Winter) falls asleep and joins the hive mind, and as the invaders begin trundling to other locales, trucks laden with pods, Miles (a brilliant Kevin McCarthy) is left standing alone on a highway, shrieking to passing cars helplessly: “You fools! You’re in danger… YOU’RE NEXT!”
That last line, all but screamed down the camera lens by McCarthy, horrified Allied Artists to such an extent that insisted on a wraparound ending. In the final version released in cinemas, Body Snatchers is told in flashback; Miles still yells on the highway, but the scene dissolves back to Santa Mira, where we’re told that the crisis was averted by those good people at the FBI.
Released at the height of the Cold War, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers was famously interpreted one of two ways: either as anti-Communist propaganda, or a critique of anti-Communism itself, and the unthinking ways people can form themselves into groups.
Don Siegel, perhaps wisely, denied that there was any political undercurrent to his movie; Jack Finney, in the handful of times he was interviewed about his book, seemed almost irritated at the various meanings ascribed to it: there have also been feminist readings and suggestions that it’s about the suffocating nature of small town life.
“I’m in the business of writing entertainment,” Finney said rather firmly when The Washington Post brought up the subject of messages or subtexts.
Finney may not have particularly liked dissecting his own work, but The Body Snatchers comes to life precisely because it’s so filled with subtext and nuance. It isn’t a thread teased out in the movies, but the novel’s version of Miles Bennell initially resists his feelings for Becky – he expresses fears that if he falls in love with her, then their relationship might one day end in divorce, as his previous one had. For many pages, he actively resists his own emotions, even as he and Becky try to resist the invaders’ plot, and for much of the story’s second half, resist falling asleep. (The pods tend to do their dirty work while their victims slumber.)
There’s also a certain melancholy that seeps into the pages. For Miles, Santa Mira, with its little diners, library and eccentric inhabitants, is all he’s ever known. But there’s a sense that history has passed the town by; a proposed highway that would have connected it to the wider world never happened, and now the only route in and out is rutted and potholed.
When the invasion begins to happen, Santa Mira grows even more faded and wan; the pod people are a collective, but they have no particular need to maintain the environment they find themselves in. Weeds spring up around town; the now replaced proprietors of diners keep their establishments open to make things seem normal, but the food and drink is so dreadful that visitors passing through will barely touch it.
The novel ends with the invasion repelled, but the pod people still remain around the increasingly degraded town, quiet and listless; in five years, Miles observes, they’ll all be dead, and Santa Mira will be filled with newcomers from the rest of California, there to take advantage of all the houses that have suddenly become empty.
It’s something remarkably similar to what happened to the real Mill Valley, where Finney spent the rest of his life. In the 1950s, it was still quiet, with a population of maybe 7,000; within years, the number almost doubled. The old library was demolished and replaced by a bigger, more modern one; like so many other places, gentrification crept in, and it’s long since become a place for the wealthy.
The Body Snatchers book also gets at something more primal, which even the weaker adaptations capitalised on: our need for connection. The pod takeover is frightening not just because people are seeing the light flicker out in the eyes of their loved ones, but because, day by day, society reorders itself. Miles Bennell goes from the centre of his community to the member of an increasingly small group of outsiders; their choices are to flee, resist, or simply give into the new order.
Wherever they’re set, and whatever current concerns they’ve had grafted onto them, the remakes have all contained this same basic fear of being cut off, of being left alone. There’s the blood curdling point-and-scream introduced in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version. In Abel Ferrara’s less well-received but still important 1993 take, Meg Tilly gets the unforgettable line, “Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere. Because there’s no one like you left.”
That line, surely, sums up the wrenching terror that lies at the heart of the Body Snatchers concept.
There’s no one like you left.
In both the book and the adaptations, there’s reliably a moment where a pod person argues that, from a certain perspective, life among this new world order will be better than before. There’ll be no more war, no more prejudice, no more struggle. It’s an idea that Vince Gilligan picks up and runs with in Pluribus: as horrifying as the initial takeover is, the Earth ruled over by a collective of roughly eight billion people is rather utopian.
Members of this interconnected society go about their tasks calmly and happily. There is no ownership or distrust; no lying or violence. The hive mind’s major flaw, in fact, is that it’s so honest, so nice, that it can easily be exploited by the few remaining humans left. In this regard, Carol is both the story’s hero and its greatest danger.
Like Finney’s novel, Pluribus’s underlying meaning is left somewhat open to interpretation. On one level, it holds up an unflattering mirror to ordinary human nature; in Carol, we see an amplified version of a typical person, warts and all. She’s intelligent and quick-witted, but cynical, stubborn and self-destructive. The hive mind, by contrast, is so incapable of selfishness and cruelty that we begin to fear for its safety. As dreadful as we humans can be, Pluribus seems to suggest, we need a bit of selfishness and individualism to survive; the double irony being that, because we’re so territorial, xenophobic and closed off, we may fail to avert the existential threats that loom over our own species.
When The Washington Post caught up with Jack Finney in 1994, the author was in his 80s. He’d found late career success with the books Time After Time and Time And Again, the former then set to become a film directed by Robert Redford. It never happened. The newspaper described a somewhat reclusive figure; its headline was, simply ‘The Invisible Man.’
Roaming the streets of Mill Valley, journalist David Stretfield was surprised to discover that the local bookshop didn’t sell copies of The Body Snatchers. Nor did the worker behind the counter know that the novel was set in the very town in which he was standing.
By this stage, the third adaptation of his book – Ferrara’s Body Snatchers – had just been released. Finney’s agent had managed to finagle some money out of Warner Bros at the time, and he’d previously gotten some cash for the 1978 version, too; all told, Stretfield wrote, Finney had made $15,000 from a franchise likely worth millions. It was better than nothing, but hardly a king’s ransom given the cultural value of his creation.
A year later, in March 1995, The New York Times caught up with Finney for its own profile. It too described an author who preferred to remain out of the limelight; he seldom gave interviews, and even more rarely gave public speeches of any kind. Finney recalled that he was once invited to appear on a panel about story writing at the University of Berkeley, and initially turned it down. But having been reassured that he was bound to have something worthwhile to tell the audience once the time came, Finney finally relented. He turned up at the big auditorium, took the microphone, and fumbled over his words. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
He was more comfortable in his Mill Valley home, occasionally getting a taxi with his wife to his favourite restaurant, Piazza D’Angelo, which is still there to this day. Few around town seemed to know who Finney was, but he didn’t appear to mind; he simply sat in his home office, quietly coming up with new stories.
Jack Finney passed away in November 1995 at the age of 84 – mere months after the Times profile was published. Like alien spores, the Body Snatchers concept floated up into the stars, waiting to descend on generations of other writers.
Pluribus is simply its latest incarnation.
