Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) on Netflix
NR19561h 20mHorrorSci-FiThriller
In Santa Mira, California, Dr. Miles Bennell's patients insist their relatives have been replaced by exact doubles. His former girlfriend, Becky Driscoll, has returned to town.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.7/1060,544 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Dr. Miles Bennell, a doctor in the California town of Santa Mira, sees a run of patients who believe their relatives have come back as identical impostors. The psychiatrist Dr. Dan Kauffman tells him the cases are mass hysteria. Becky Driscoll, Miles's former girlfriend, has returned to town after her divorce was settled, and the two take up their relationship again. Miles's friend Jack Belicec finds a body in his basement that has no features and no fingerprints, and it takes on Jack's features while they watch. Having seen Becky's father come up from his basement, Miles looks there and finds a duplicate of Becky. He calls Dan, who finds the bodies gone and tells Miles he has fallen for the hysteria as well.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Siegel and Mainwaring were happy with the film as shot, which ended with Miles screaming as truckloads of pods passed him on the road, but the studio, wary of a pessimistic conclusion, insisted on adding a prologue and epilogue that framed the story as a flashback with a more hopeful outcome.- Walter Wanger first considered Gig Young, Dick Powell and Joseph Cotten for Miles Bennell and Anne Bancroft, Donna Reed, Kim Hunter and Vera Miles for Becky Driscoll, but the lower budget made him offer the part to Richard Kiley, who turned it down; Kevin McCarthy was cast instead.
- Three previews in the summer of 1955 were reported as successful in Wanger's memos, but Mainwaring and Siegel said audiences could not follow the film and laughed in the wrong places, after which the studio removed much of its humor and "humanity".
- Wanger and Siegel wanted to shoot in Mill Valley, California, the town Jack Finney described in his novel, but the location proved too expensive, so Los Angeles-area spots such as Sierra Madre, Chatsworth, Glendale, Los Feliz, Bronson and Beachwood Canyons stood in for the fictional Santa Mira.
- Although Siegel shot Invasion of the Body Snatchers in a 1.85:1 ratio, it was projected at 2.00:1 in Superscope, a post-production laboratory process that created an anamorphic print from nonanamorphic source material.
- The slang expression "pod people", which arose in late 20th-century American culture, refers to the emotionless human duplicates in the film.
- While the film was being shot, Wanger tried to get permission in England to use a Winston Churchill quotation as a preface and sought Orson Welles to voice the preface and a trailer, writing speeches for him in June 1955, but Welles was not persuaded; Ray Bradbury was considered instead.
