Critical reception Though
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was largely ignored by critics on its initial run,
Filmsite.org ranked it as one of the best films of 1956. The film holds a 98% approval rating and 9.1/10 rating at the film
review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes. The site's consensus reads: "One of the best political allegories of the 1950s,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an efficient, chilling blend of sci-fi and horror." In recent years, critics such as Dan Druker of the
Chicago Reader have called the film a "genuine Sci-Fi classic."
Leonard Maltin described
Invasion of the Body Snatchers as "influential, and still very scary." Mark Steyn described it as "a big film", despite its limited budget.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected in 1994 for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In June 2008, the
American Film Institute revealed its "
Ten top Ten"—the best 10 films in 10 "classic" American film genres—after polling more than 1,500 people from the creative community.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was acknowledged as the 9th-best film in the science-fiction genre. The film was also placed on AFI's ''AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Thrills'', a list of America's most heart-pounding films. The film was included on
Bravo's
100 Scariest Movie Moments. Similarly, the
Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 29th scariest film ever made. IGN ranked it as the 15th-best sci-fi picture.
Time magazine included
Invasion of the Body Snatchers on their list of 100 all-time best films, the top 10 1950s Sci-Fi Movies, and Top 25 Horror Films. In 1999,
Entertainment Weekly listed it as the 53rd best movie of all time. Similarly, the book
Four Star Movies: The 101 Greatest Films of All Time placed the movie at #60.
Themes Some reviewers saw in the story a commentary on the dangers facing the United States for turning a blind eye to
McCarthyism.
Leonard Maltin wrote of a
McCarthy-era subtext, or of bland
conformity in postwar
Eisenhower-era America. Others viewed it as an allegory for the loss of personal autonomy and individualism in the
Soviet Union or
communist systems in general. For the
BBC, David Wood summarized the circulating popular interpretations of the film as: "The sense of postwar, anticommunist paranoia is acute, as is the temptation to view the film as a metaphor for the tyranny of the McCarthy era." Danny Peary in
Cult Movies pointed out that the studio-mandated addition of the framing story had changed the film's stance from anti-McCarthyite to
anti-communist. In
An Illustrated History of the Horror Film,
Carlos Clarens saw a trend manifesting itself in science-fiction films, dealing with dehumanization and fear of the loss of individual identity, being historically connected to the end of "the
Korean War and the well-publicized reports of
brainwashing techniques." Comparing
Invasion of the Body Snatchers with
Robert Aldrich's
Kiss Me Deadly and
Orson Welles'
Touch of Evil, Brian Neve found a sense of disillusionment rather than straightforward messages, with all three films being "less radical in any positive sense than reflective of the decline of [the screenwriters'] great liberal hopes." Despite a general agreement among film critics regarding these political connotations of the film, actor Kevin McCarthy said in an interview included on the 1998 DVD release that he felt no political allegory was intended. The interviewer stated that he had spoken with the author of the novel, Jack Finney, who professed no specific political allegory in the work. In his autobiography,
I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History,
Walter Mirisch writes: "People began to read meanings into pictures that were never intended.
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an example of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor original author Jack Finney, nor myself, saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple." Don Siegel spoke more openly of an existing allegorical subtext, but denied a strictly political point of view: "[...] I felt that this was a very important story. I think that the world is populated by pods and I wanted to show them. I think so many people have no feeling about cultural things, no feeling of pain, of sorrow. [...] The political reference to Senator McCarthy and totalitarianism was inescapable but I tried not to emphasize it because I feel that motion pictures are primarily to entertain and I did not want to preach." Film scholar
J.P. Telotte wrote that Siegel intended for pods to be seductive; their spokesperson, a psychiatrist, was chosen to provide an authoritative voice that would appeal to the desire to "abdicate from human responsibility in an increasingly complex and confusing modern world."
Subsequent adaptations Three subsequent adaptations of
The Body Snatchers have been made:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978),
Body Snatchers (1993), and
The Invasion (2007). An untitled fifth adaptation from
Warner Bros. was reported to be in development in 2017.
David Leslie Johnson was signed to be the screenwriter. ==Home media==