Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 American science-fiction horror film directed by Don Siegel and produced by Walter Wanger. It is adapted by Daniel Mainwaring from Jack Finney's 1954 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers, originally serialized in Collier's magazine. It stars Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, with supporting roles played by Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones, Jean Willes and Ralph Dumke.

The film's storyline concerns an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in the fictional California town of Santa Mira. Alien plant spores have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of producing a visually identical copy of a human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it until only the replacement is left; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion. Little by little, a local doctor uncovers this "quiet" invasion and attempts to stop it.

The black-and-white film was exhibited in 2.00:1 Superscope and shot in the film noir style. Daniel Mainwaring adapted the screenplay from The film was an independent production but distributed by Allied Artists Pictures as a double feature with the British science-fiction film The Atomic Man (and in some markets with Indestructible Man).

The film premiered on February 5, 1956. Largely ignored by critics upon release, it proved a financial success and has been retrospectively praised as one of the best and most influential science-fiction films of the 1950s, spawning several remakes and other derivative works. The slang expression "pod people" that arose in late 20th-century U.S. culture refers to the emotionless duplicates seen in the film. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected in 1994 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."