Horror.com Forums - Talk about horror. - Last Seen 70s/80s Movie

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978
9/10

It does what it is well. Effective sci-fi thriller, good basically all film aspects.

'Bad guy' Allegory Traget?

I couldn't help but to try to determine who the real 'bad guy' is in the film's allegory. In the 1956 film version, at the time, most said the aliens were communism. Others determined at a closer look, and considering the script writer Daniel Mainwaring, McCarthyism was the alien allegory target. Who is it for the 1978 version?

Sure, the film's for profit, and for entertainment; and maybe at most a nod toward a warning against sleeping through mass brain-washing, loss of freedoms, dehumanization and/or dangers of conformity. But does the film actually reveal it's alien allegory target?

I instantly knew I heard the answer during the book discussion of the mud-bath scene between Veronica Cartwright and the patron. I never heard of the books or authors before, and the titles have no intrinsic meaning. They didn't mean anything to me. So I watched the film and made my own determinations void of the two references.

The references I picked up on were the priest and the Amazing Grace song coming from the boat. First, a priest (Robert Duvall) on the swing, staring strangely at the children being handed flowers by a teacher. Was he angry at the site? Was he in favor of it? Was he an alien? I couldn't determine, but couldn't ignore this odd and blatant shot. At the end of the film, Sutherland hears an instrumental of Amazing Grace at the San Francisco bay dock. SMALL SPOILER HERE: He has hope to escape via boat; and the song evokes hope (generally to most). As he approaches the cargo ship, the song stops, and he see's pods being loaded on the boat. Does this scene indict christianity/religion, or does the music ceasing indicate christianity/religion been squashed by the aliens? I'm not sure, but taking the film and scene as a whole, I would certainly guess the latter.

Basically, I didn't grasp a specific bad guy allegory target on my own.

So what were the two books?: Worlds in Collision, by Immanuel Velikovsky, and Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon. What do these books suggest are targets? Like I said, I never even heard of these, and (sorry), I'm not going to research these to point that I give a definitive answer. But for anyone interested, I'll quote the one source/opinion I happenstanced upon:

Quote:

These two books are clues – while on the surface, this is a standard-fare sci fi/horror film, yet underlying the cheese is a profoundly occult message. Jewish psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky is famous for his alternative theory of cosmology and cosmogony, known as “catastrophism,” where ancient mythology and its representational assigning of the gods to specific planets actually plays a role in reconstructing primal history and human origins.

Velikovsky was lambasted by both modern science and his contemporaries, but whatever his flaws, my suspicion is that he was rejected for three reasons: He utilized the Bible as a document that reported actual historical events, was critical of carbon dating, and held to an electromagnetic view of the universe, as opposed to Newtonian atomistic ideas. The slightest hint of any of those three ideas is enough to be rejected wholesale by modern “science,” which makes Velikovsky all the more interesting and worth considering, in my estimation. The Velikovsky archive can be found here. This is not a full endorsement on my part, but that the ideas are worth examination, due to the incoherence of modern dogmatic materialism.

The other book is Stapledon’s Star Maker, which scientistic illuminist Arthur C. Clarke considered one of the most important works of science fiction. Star Maker was written in 1937 and actually utilizes the theme of genetic engineering far ahead of its time, while Stapledon’s works would go on to influence other top British technocrats, such as H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. This confirms my thesis thesis that Invasion is specifically referencing genetic engineering and cross-species manipulation with the bizarre “dog-man” scene, as the books were obviously chosen as specific clues as to elucidate this point. Like Star Maker, Velikovsky too was interested in the idea of other lifeforms seeding our planet, a close adaptation of the theory others have called “panspermia.” While Invasion is not dealing with panspermia specifically, the allusions to it in the film and in the authors suggest an emergent, time-bound deus ex machina “creation,” in the least. In other words, all three are proffering the cryptocracy’s relatively recently-constructed mythology of man’s creation, manipulation and/or guidance by “space brothers.”