Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Director: Philip Kaufman
Screenwriter: W. D. Richter
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy

This film is about aliens. Technically. But also, it isn’t.

This is the second adaptation of “The Body Snatchers” by Jack Finney (following the 1956 Don Siegel adaptation, also titled Invasion of the Body Snatchers). It follows roughly the same plot, where strange, plant-based life forms come to Earth after travelling across the stars, where they grow replicas of human beings in huge pods, each identical save for the removing of emotion (and so no war, no pain, no love). Their infiltration of the community they find themselves in is the scene of paranoia, of the discovery of a conspiracy, of the terror of realising that your family members may look and sound the same, but that they aren’t actually them. A small band of survivors must battle the odds when the system has been infiltrated and turned against them. The novel and original film, taking place in the midst of 1950s Red Scare McCartheyism, is as thinly veiled an allegory for America’s fear of communism as you can get, though Finney denied this throughout his life (movies such as The Thing From Another World and It Came From Outer Space also follow the trend). Both of those texts are also seminal sci-fi horror reading/viewing. The question, therefore, is how does this version stack up?

Part of the genius of this interpretation is the decision to move the action from the small town of Santa Mira (in the film)/Mill County (in the book) to downtown San Francisco. The added chaos of urban life gives a sense of menace to the spreading contamination. The allegory here is of corporations turning people into shells of their former selves, and of the destruction of the natural world – a kind of capitalist updating of the red weed from H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”. Roger Ebert commented that it might also be influenced by the Watergate scandal, with tapped phones and wires. Whilst this is a possibility, those features were always elements in the novel and the first film. What is certain, is that by putting this viral personality takeover in the middle of a city, the danger is far more immediate. With the first film, if it gets out of the small town, there’s still a chance. There’s a larger civilisation out there to help. Here, if you’re dead in the city, with all that manpower and all those connections, with all that modernity, there’s not much chance that anywhere else is going to last. Along with this updating, the pod-people in their growing stage are much more organic, more tissue-like, adding to the ecological themes. It isn’t as strong a body-horror shift, but perhaps comparable to the way in which the 1958 version of The Fly (starring Vincent Price) was updated for modern audiences: a reimagining rather than a remake, as directed by David Cronenberg in 1986 (ironically, also starring Jeff Goldblum).

The air of being hemmed in is all around. The buildings impose, the close proximity that everyone is to each other (and in some sequences having several of the characters together in every shot one after the other), makes the idea that the people next to you aren’t who they say they are even worse. The main cast is terrific, bringing sufficient weight and drama to a terror slowly building up as the horrific realisation of what is going on dawns on them. The little things occurring in the background add to that paranoia, and is something Edgar Wright specifically mentions as an influence on the background details for Shaun of the Dead in his DVD commentary (ironically, Wright’s body-snatching film The World’s End actually has the ending of the original novel, in which the invading force realises humanity will never be converted, which is something no actual novel adaptation has kept). The occasional shots of the garbage compactors crushing the husks of used pods comes back time and time again unmentioned but always there, and when you realise what they are, by then it’s all too late. Everything’s already over.

Speaking of endings, Kevin McCarthy (who played Dr Miles in the first film) has a cameo in this one, playing very much a similar character (but not the same), slamming on Donald Sutherland’s car and screaming ‘You’re next!’, much like his famous ending to the first film. Even if it’s not Dr Miles, it gives the impression that Miles has been wandering for years warning us of the oncoming apocalypse. It’s so iconic an original ending that one wonders how this film could possibly one-up it. And yet it does, in an ending reveal burned into the public consciousness with just sound. Sound that has drained from the world as the film runs on, with characters fleeing through the streets, their feet slamming against the road. Somehow that’s the most disturbing thing of all. The takeover of the pod people, with their uniformity, has reduced the need for talk, for going anywhere unplanned, for noise. Despite their horrifying screech, the emptiness of the sound of the world is what truly scares. The naturalness of the world has faded. Now it is simply a factory of the pods, a greenhouse for empty husks.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has everything you could want. A great cast, direction that mostly stands up (there are unfortunately some parts when Kaufman decides to go for some egregious camera movements which betray the camp B-movie roots and lodge in the cinematic throat), an all-consuming tone, and some of the most iconic scenes of all science-fiction and horror. It has to be seen to be believed, and, even with the odd misstep, remains an all-time classic.

Score: 20/24

The Slasher horror movie became fruitful in the late 1970s and directors began to push the boundaries of what could be shown on screen. Many were popular at grindhouses and drive-in cinemas, attracting fans of low-budget splatter-horror and gore.

The films in this list were considered to be some of the most shocking horror films of their time, most of them using never-before-seen special effects, horrifying narratives and intensely thrilling performances from their casts.

With such a plethora of memorable, genre-defining releases, the 1970s offered up dozens of memorable horror movie moments, the 10 Best of which will be presented in this Top List.

These are the 10 Best Horror Movie Moments of the 1970s.

Let us know your favourites in the comments, and be sure to follow us on Twitter.

10. Dawn of the Dead (1978) – Basement Zombies

Kicking off our top ten is the second in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series, Dawn of the Dead. Showing the further extent of the events in the first film, survivors of the outbreak barricade themselves in a shopping mall amid mass public hysteria.

One of the film’s more unnerving scenes comes at the start. Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reiniger) find themselves fighting through a housing block full of zombies before coming upon the building’s basement. Realising that residents have been hiding their dead rather than delivering them to the National Guard, Peter and Roger discover a room of zombies all feasting on fresh flesh and struggling inside body bags. In a drawn-out moment, Peter begins to kill each ‘undead’ individually by shooting, which Roger steps in to help with.

The scene focuses particular attention to the ethnicity of the undead – with the majority of them being black or Latino – a big hint to the awful treatment and conditions of housing for minority communities in the 70s and beyond. Although this scene is not necessarily terrifying by way of jump scares or some of those yet to come in this list, it is scary in a way that points to the true terror of our own world and thus as poignant of a moment in horror as any to come.

9. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – The Scream

At number nine is Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a remake of the 1956 film and adapted from the novel by Jack Finney. In a world where humans are being replaced by alien duplicates, the most disturbing moment in the film comes at the last minute.

In the final scene, Matthew (Donald Sutherland) reveals himself to be a duplicated “pod person” by emitting an ear-splitting shriek whilst pointing frighteningly at Nancy (Veronica Cartwright). Presenting a constant sense of unease throughout the film, this scene is the icing on the cake. It has since become the stuff of legend, the above shot recognisable to all fans of film, not just those who enjoy this Ivasion of the Body Snatchers, and one of the most memorably unnerving moments of 1970s horror.