Invasion of the Body Snatchers

A small-town doctor finds patients insisting their relatives are impostors. They are correct.

Don Siegel shot it in nineteen days for under 400,000 dollars and the economy is the style: flat daylight, ordinary streets, and no effect more elaborate than a pod and some foam.

The reading has been argued about since release. It has been taken as anti-communist, as anti-McCarthy, and as being about post-war conformity generally, and Siegel and the writer disagreed with each other about it in interviews. That it survives all three readings is why it endures.

The studio forced a framing device onto the beginning and end because they thought the original ending was too bleak. Siegel hated it. The original ends on Kevin McCarthy in the middle of a highway shouting at traffic, and it is one of the great final images.

Remade well in 1978, which is rare.