In the Flesh: Body Snatchers

“By tomorrow it’ll be like it never happened,” whispers Carol Malone (Meg Tilly) to her husband Steve (Terry Kinney) as she lulls him to sleep with a gentle massage. Abel Ferrera’s Body Snatchers cleverly juxtaposes repressed and violent suburban family life with portrayals of militaristic conformity and groupthink on an army base where EPA agent Steve is stationed, linking the two via their shared incentivization of denial and silent obedience. Where’s the line between Steve seizing his teenage daughter Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) by the arm repeatedly to control her during an argument and men in uniform showing up in the middle of the night to disappear one of your bunkmates from the barracks? It’s thinner than you might like to imagine. Hierarchy enables the spread of the titular parasitic life forms. Rules. Societal norms.

This comes into particularly crushing focus when five-year-old Andy (Reilly Murphy) sees his mother Carol taken by the body snatchers, drained dry and replaced, her naked copy emerging from the closet to stare at him without emotion. Andy flees, escaping the house, until he’s brought back by local military personnel. Then by his sister. Then by their father. “My mommy is dead,” he tells them over and over, but the idea that he’s right never crosses their minds. They go on living in a dead house, with a dead mother, long past the point at which they’ve all seen evidence of what’s unfolding all around them. When Andy himself is finally replaced, our inability to deal with the complexity of children as human beings leads his sister to ignore the signs, nearly dooming their escape attempt. Our desire for normalcy outstrips our desire for survival.

The effects in Ferrara’s film are impressive, ranging from subtle deformations of skin to the incredible sequence in which we see a “pod person” gestate in real time, the embryo-like creature bulging and unfolding with terrible rapidity. It calls to mind the iconic resurrection scene from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, but the murky water and soft golden light elide any mechanical faults and give it an appearance of real wriggling life. The Foley, too, is excellent, from the brittle crunches and squelching of the transformation sequences to the unholy reverberating shriek with which the replaced point out the unassimilated among them, immediately recognizable but distinct from the 1973 adaptation’s rendition. Perhaps the film’s greatest asset, though, is Meg Tilly, whose cold, inhuman stare and ethereal beauty are matched only by her passionless conviction as she monologues at her family about the inevitability of their death, the end of human emotion, and the final triumph of empty conformity.