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 Birds (1963)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriter: Evan Hunter
Starring: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, Veronica Cartwright, Ethel Griffies, Charles McGraw, Ruth McDevitt, Lonny Chapman 

Memorably, in Back to the Future Part II, after a holographic advert for “Jaws 19” jumps out of a billboard at Marty McFly, he wryly quips “shark still looks fake!”. One of the most recurrent questions since so-called natural horror or creature feature films started being a thing in the mid-20th century has always been… does this matter? 60 years ago, hot on the heels of his smash-hit success Psycho, the Master of Suspense unleashed another unexpected horror upon the world, but how well does The Birds hold up to modern scrutiny?

Melanie Daniels’ (Tippi Hedren) spontaneous trip to a peaceful coastal town to come out on the right side of a practical joke instigated by charming lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) takes a far more life-threatening turn when the local residents are mysteriously attacked by the entire local population of birds. Inspired in equal parts by the Daphne du Maurier short story of the same title and a strange real-life incident involving sudden unprovoked seabird attacks from a few years before the film’s release, The Birds wisely avoids the temptation to provide a definitive explanation for what is going on and lets its unforgettable imagery speak for itself. 

The no-nonsense opening titles with bird silhouettes flying past the camera accompanied by a cacophony of noise prepares you for the two main aspects of filmmaking that the film revolutionised: the sound and the special effects designs. The proto-electronic instrument, the Mixtur-Trautonium, brought an uncanny eeriness to the shrieks of birds and created an all-encompassing soundscape that made a traditional score surplus to requirements, often coming across as far scarier than anything we are actually shown. 

Harmless caged domestic birds are contrasted with the birds acting threateningly in the skies outside early in the film, emphasising the power of the natural world that we humans can only fleetingly keep in check.

The bird attack scenes in which hundreds of birds appear to be flying around and pecking panicking people were created by Disney’s Ub Iwerks using the same sodium vapor “yellowscreen” process extensively utilised for more magical purposes in Mary Poppins (1964). Two separately filmed elements are exposed using a beam-splitter and the narrow colour spectrum allows for both layers to appear untarnished and relatively convincing by standards of the time. This is admittedly less the case when we pull out for a wide shot of the chaos in broad daylight, and the illusion still had to be completed with a combination of real birds on set and a menagerie of models and puppets.

This being Tippi Hedren’s screen debut really shows. She wears the hell out of a mint green suit and has an entertaining passive-aggressive flirtation with Rod Taylor, but her range beyond acting scared was limited at this stage in her career. She would go on to do much more interesting work in her next collaboration with Hitchcock, in psychological thriller Marnie, but she also stands in for many of the director’s unforgivably mistreated blonde leading ladies.

Jessica Tandy easily acts everyone else off the screen, giving her widow steely resilience and a painful history. The characters are for the most part a bit of a let-down, only working in the broadest of strokes, and that’s after Hitch asked his screenwriter, novelist Evan Hunter, for rewrites. Everyone gets just one unique character trait and 11-year-old Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) is hilariously made to sound like a hippie student (“Aw mom, I know all that democracy jazz!”).

The more potentially interesting moments of characterisation are likely unintended and only show up when viewing the film through specific critical frameworks, like the fact that no matter what feelings she voices regarding Mitch there is a bit of a flirtatious lesbian atmosphere between Melanie and schoolteacher Annie (Suzanne Pleshette).

Sooner or later this kind of movie needs an expert to come in and explain it all and that role falls to local ornithologist Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffies): “Birds have been on this planet since archaeopteryx, 140 million years ago. Doesn’t it seem odd that they’d wait all that time to start a war against humanity?”. Ultimately she’s not a lot of help to the group, but she has a valiant attempt at rationalising the chaos whilst gesturing with her cigarette for effect.

The Birds was made in an era when (at least in a film) everyone left their doors unlocked and a stranger could ask in a corner shop for someone’s exact address or a teacher for a child’s name and for some reason nobody would call the police. Having said this, Hitchcock famously dismissed any such logical criticisms of his plots or why his film’s characters don’t do things that most of us would, commenting “because it’s dull”.

There’s a long build with not a lot happening in this film before all feathery hell breaks loose at the halfway point. A series of tense set pieces with the survivors running from cover to cover and trying to fortify their positions against attacks may well have influenced the standard structure of the zombie movies that would become horror’s most popular sub-genre in the following decades. Like even the early Dead films, The Birds is fairly bloody and brutal for a film of the time, with the bird attacks and their aftermath resulting in pecked up and mutilated bodies and no small amount of trauma for the those lucky enough to come away with everything intact. Any hope of a happy ending is also left fairly ambiguous at Hitch’s request. 

The Birds has a lot going for it, with Hitchcock’s effortless mastery of maintaining suspense and pacing the story for maximum impact. The screenplay is serviceable enough, but the characters are paper-thin and your overall enjoyment might largely depend on your response to special effects that look more striking than 100% convincing, though never as terrible as shonky reimaginings like Birdemic might have you believe. 

Score: 17/24

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.

Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
Screenwriter: Dan O’Bannon
Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Bolaji Badejo

Before Ridley Scott became one of the most reliable directors-for-hire in the business, he quickened the heartbeat of horror fans everywhere with his terrifically accomplished breakthrough, Alien. This isn’t to write Scott off as a jobbing filmmaker – what readers of Cahiers du Cinema and the like would call a metteur en scène – rather, Scott’s efficiency in shooting scripts to a deadline and delivering feats of visual mastery under budget places him in the rare camp of auteur sans ego, a problem-solver first and foremost bolstered by an unmatched eye for detail and a ruthless work ethic.

Scott, like James Cameron and George Lucas, has always been on the pulse of what visual effects can achieve, though tempered by a rare level-headedness perhaps not shared by his contemporaries. Think of how the exoskeletal augmentations of Aliens would eventually evolve into the mech-suit brawls of Cameron’s Avatar, while Scott, in contrast, would turn to spectral introspection with his eventual sequel/prequel Prometheus.

Alien is characteristically tactile, a visual marvel with an affinity for achievable minutiae. In the opening minutes, the interior of the Nostromo breathes to life with deceptively simple light and sound effects that seem to expand the claustrophobic set to feeling every bit the spaceward city represented by the exterior miniature. We talk about setting as character, but the Nostromo is not so much a personification of atmosphere as much as an anatomical cross-section.

I was lucky enough to catch a re-release of the film for its 40th anniversary with the kind collaboration of the BFI Southbank in London. What’s most striking about the crisp restoration is how every interior detail is lifted into stark relief – the walls sweat with steam and condensation, and wires and tubing spread through corridors like capillaries. One of its quieter moments follows the great Harry Dean Stanton taking an impromptu shower in the cargo bay, the ceiling from which it seems to be inexplicably raining.

The film, of course, is loaded with innuendo; much has already been said about its phallic predilections, the reverse penetration, conflating consumption with food and sex. The crew of seven is hunted and devoured through air vents that open and close like orifices by a creature that is both biologically perverse yet undeniably industrial. There’s a very good reason why the final scare comes when Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley mistakes the alien for an innocuous wall of her escape shuttle. Teaming with artist H.R Giger and set decorator Ian Whittaker, Scott envelops viewers with a paralysing fear of replacement, becoming expendable in favour of soulless mutations of machine and matter.

This being my fourth or fifth viewing of Alien, I’m now able to communicate better what exactly it is that scares me about it so much. Moreso than awakening subconscious biological repulsions of the other, or inherently masculine sexual insecurities, the key is in realising that the most frightening sequence is the revelation that Ash (an uncanny early performance from Ian Holm that wipes the floor with Michael Fassbender’s David) is an android. Any initial fears of a ravenous, acid-blooded carnivore with the deadly efficiency of a slaughterhouse are immediately trumped by the slow, unsettling drip of milky blood from Ash’s forehead. The creature, the mesh of flesh and artifice driven by inhuman consciousness, was, of course, onboard the whole time.

Despite its initially poor reception, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was still very much in the public consciousness, and it’s curious watching Scott, more than ten years later, playfully dangle the Nostromo’s onboard AI as a potential successor to HAL-9000. Teasingly named “Mother”, the system never speaks above a textual register, but does encase visitors within an embryonic room of blinking lights when it relays life-altering news with all the empathy of an unexpected phone bill. While Mother is never directly antagonistic, the computer earns every syllable of Ripley’s first use of her catchphrase, “You BITCH!” when it refuses to halt the ship’s impending self-destruction on a technicality. At every stage, computers and autonomous beings dictate the remaining life span of the ship’s crew to the second, and Ripley’s emergence as the eventual protagonist remains a glorious testament to human will.

Unfortunately, the film does remind modern viewers of the expectations of 70s horror filmmaking when Sigourney Weaver, seemingly scot-free, strips down to skimpy underwear. Defenders have retroactively explained the choice as an integral demonstration of vulnerability before the final action beat, but it’s hard not to read the lingering shots of the then unknown actress as eye candy intended as an award for the audience’s dogged determination to make it this far. While it’s not quite as gratuitous as other films of the decade (and, indeed, subsequent decades), and it’s tempting to encourage Weaver’s soft contours as a visual protest against the film’s thematically loaded body horror, I think we all breathe a sigh of relief when Ripley remains entirely fully clothed for the sequel.

Alien’s pairing of genuine, spine-tingling horror and thematic resonance put Ridley Scott on the map, and it’s frankly unfair that the masterful director was able to immediately follow-up with Blade Runner, another existential sci-fi classic. 40 years on, and it has remained one of his best, most invasive and obsessive films. It’s truly a testament that, despite Prometheus and Alien: Covenant’s irritating disposition to posit answers to questions never asked, every turned corner of that first nightmare invites mystery and intrigue. We still don’t really know where the aliens came from, and it’s for the best that we never find out.

22/24

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