Invasion of The Body Snatchers
Clip | 4m 13sVideo has Closed Captions
Host Mikayla Daniels talks about the details of creating the Pod People effect.
Host Mikayla Daniels talks about the original 1956 version, the details of creating the Pod People effect, and touches on the underlying theme of McCarthyism from the 1950's.
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SATURDAY NIGHT CINEMA is a local public television program presented by KSPS PBS
Invasion of The Body Snatchers
Clip | 4m 13sVideo has Closed Captions
Host Mikayla Daniels talks about the original 1956 version, the details of creating the Pod People effect, and touches on the underlying theme of McCarthyism from the 1950's.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Welcome to my web comments on the Saturday Night Cinema broadcast of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” from 1956.
I'm Mikayla Daniels here to share a bit more about the film.
While the 1978 remake with Donald Sutherland may be more popular than this original version.
This film is a great example of early body horror film making.
The slang expression “pod people that arose in the late 20th century US culture refers to the emotionless duplicates seen in this film.
Production designer Ted Haworth came up with a fairly simple and inexpensive about 30,000 total each idea for creating the pods.
The most difficult part was when the pods burst open, revealing the likenesses of the actors.
The actors had to have naked impressions of themselves made out of thin, skin tight latex, making the cast, which involved being submerged in the very hot casting material with only a straw in their mouth to breathe through, was grueling for the actors, especially Carolyn Jones, who was claustrophobic.
Dana Wynter recalled, “I was in this thing while it hardened, and of course it got rather warm I was breathing through straws or something quite bizarre, and the rest of me was encased.
It was like a sarcophagus.
The guys who were making it tapped on the back of the thing and said, “Dana, listen, we won't be long.
We're just off to lunch.” In the end, we had to cover everything except for just the nostrils and I think a little aperture for the mouth.” I can only imagine how claustrophobic that must have been for the actors, because I once had a cast made of my face and everything was covered except for a tiny hole for a straw that I had to breathe through.
And you have to sit there longer than you would think for it to harden up.
I can say I've only ever done that once, and I'm not really interested in going through it again.
During the film's original release, papier maché pods were on display in theater lobbies, as well as black and white cutouts of Kevin McCarthy and Dana Winter running frantically away from a crowd of pod people.
Now that is some good theater marketing, just like the film “Clue”, which I recently hosted, Communist panic is also a major theme in this film.
Lead actor Kevin McCarthy and author Jack Finney have always denied the rumor that the story is a statement against McCarthyism and communism.
They just saw it as a thriller.
Director Don Siegel, however, believes that the political references to Senator Joseph McCarthy and communism are inescapable, even though he tried not to emphasize them.
The film is an adaptation of Jack Finney's 1954 book with the same title.
Kevin McCarthy didn't particularly like the script because he felt that in streamlining the novel for the screen, depth of character was lost.
He thought it was a mistake that these fairly sophisticated, educated characters had such bland dialog and manner of relating to one another, lacking the curves and nuances that you often hear in the conversation of ordinary, mature men and women.
During test screenings, much of the film's original humor and humanity was cut when the audience found it difficult to follow and laughed at all the wrong moments.
The studio insisted on edits because it wasn't policy to mix humor with horror.
Of course, now we see a lot of humor in horror films, even the ones that aren't horror comedies and that are straight horror.
It's interesting because horror and comedy are really just two sides of the same coin.
The genres are built on opposite intentions, but a shared psychological structure, while horror genre creates tension to elicit fear.
Comedy creates and releases tension to cause laughter.
I hope you enjoyed my extended comments on The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and be sure to look around our Facebook page and KSPS.org for more blogs, polls, and trivia from all the hosts and Movie Maverick Mike.
And don't forget to tune in to Saturday Night Cinema on KSPS PBS.
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Video has Closed Captions
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Video has Closed Captions
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