October Viewing – 9
So, this being October 30th and tomorrow a really long work day, it’s a pretty good bet this will be the last “October Viewing” of the year. A good friend who has been following this series of posts proposed the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movies as a good subject. And we both liked how it sort of dovetails with the whole woke Democrat pod-people meme. You know, how they speak like lifeless automatons and point and shriek if you reveal yourself not to be one of them.
Now my friend felt that even the two reboots were good subjects for the post. But as in all things I am conservative. So, let’s harken back to the 1956 original in all its black and white splendor. Dut, dut, dut daaaah!
Spoiler alert! If you want to avoid knowing the plot, skip to the boldened text below to just get my opinion.
Sturdy character actor Kevin McCarthy (no, not the politician!) stars as Dr. Miles J. Bennell. He’s a small-town doctor in the fictitious California town of Santa-something-or-other. Miles is puzzled to find that several patients are claiming that their friends and relatives have been replaced by visually identical individuals that lack any emotion. One case is a young child claiming his mother has been replaced.
So, Miles and his girlfriend Becky and their friend Jack and his wife “Teddy” begin investigating a very strange series of occurrences. Jack finds what looks like a human body but with very indistinct features, almost as if acid had burned away the facial features. Shockingly, over time the “body” begins to take on Jack’s features. And more of these bodies begin appearing. Eventually they learn that enormous seed pods are the source of these transforming “bodies.”
And soon the two couples discover that the great majority of the townspeople are pod people. The distinguishing characteristic of pod people is a complete lack of emotion in their voice and actions. While pursuing an unsuccessful attempt to broadcast this alarming news to the rest of the outside world, Jack and Teddy become “podified” and so Jack provides the exposition to Miles and Becky to explain exactly what the hell is going on.
In his sedate pod-man voice Jack explains that spores floating through outer space landed on Earth where they grew into the pods. If a pod is placed near someone (how near?) and that person falls asleep the pod will absorb the person’s memories and appearance and somehow disintegrate the real person and replace him. Jack tries to convince Miles and Becky that the procedure is painless and all for the good. Miles and Becky decide not to cooperate and run away. They try to escape from town. But they have to pass through a crowd of pod-people who are loading up trucks with seed pods for delivery to the surrounding towns. They try to act like pod-people by being emotionless but are given away by Becky’s scream when she witnesses a traffic accident. Women!
The pod people chase after them but the couple successfully take refuge in a cave that was conveniently around when they needed it. But when Miles goes out to scout an escape route Becky falls asleep and by the time Miles returns, she’s fully podified and sounds the alarm to the rest of the wooden-faced pursuers to catch Miles.
Sleep-deprived Miles runs in a nightmarish state and ends up in another town trying to warn people on the highway about the pod people. Of course, they assume he’s nuts and drag him to a hospital where he tells his story to the skeptical doctors. But just at the end of his story an emergency room worker reports that a traffic accident with a truck full of giant seed pods has produced casualties in the ER. And so, the doctors get to work calling in the FBI!
Dunt, dunt daaah!
End of the spoiler alert!
So, as you can see this is a hum-dinger of a paranoid’s dream come true. They’re all out to get you and they’re all monsters. And the emotionless pod-people are a pretty good stand in for the swarms of antidepressant-doped leftists that walk the Earth all around us and can only summon energy when they point and shriek to their cohort about the presence of some normal human in the immediate vicinity.
And this is the modern horror story. If you add a violent angle with the imposters capable of becoming murderous creatures like in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” then it’s doubly frightening, especially with the modern special effects available.
But even this old-fashioned cinematic portrayal hits home by showing the confusion when familiar surroundings aren’t what they seem. And when the truth is doubted by everyone except the growing crowd of pod-people who are coming after you then panic results. Yep, a perfect nightmare scenario. It does resemble the current state of our world too. But I’ll save that for a current events post.