A Film Canon

One of the decade's most eloquent oscillations between the domestic and the cosmic, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers condenses fears about Soviet infiltration, conversion and deindividuation into the prototypical elaboration of a shape-shifting alien species. In doing so, it provides a more compelling vision of nocturnal suburbia than any film to date, anticipating the suburban horror of the 1970s, as well as recalling both noir and the Universal horror cycle - the former in the gradual proliferation of diagonal, disorienting sightlines (ultimately identified with the gaze of the malignant pods); the latter via an artful reinvention of the 'double', as well a recurrent, discursive scepticism about the place of medical and psychiatric terminology. The result is a powerful, sentimental critique of communism ("I want...children. I don't want a world without love or grief or beauty!"), that, combined with the pervasive affirmation of the inexplicable 'hunch', conjures up an extraordinary paranoia, itself encapsulated in the ambiguous status of the district under attack, which is less a fringe town of Los Angeles than a jettisoned fragment of suburbia, forced to recognise itself as a mere atom in an increasingly decentred, disorienting sprawl.