After the classic by Don Siegel from 1956 and the Philip Kaufman version from 1978, this is the third large-scale film version of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers. Ferrara’s contemporary variant is gloomy and grim. He loses little time in introducing his protagonists and the alien parasites out to get humanity.Leading lady is Marti, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the biologist Steve Malone, who is ordered to inpect the chemical weapons at the Selma military base in Alabama. Marti has tomove with her step-mother and her little half-brother Andy to a house inside the walls of the military complex. This complex turns out to be already partly under the control of the puzzling body snatchers. Marti’s new surroundings are therefore strikingly hostile. Many people on the base have had to give up their identity to the agressive aliens. Their appearance hasn’t changed, but they no longer have any feelings or emotion and are impotent instruments of the extraterrestrial imposters.Earlier film versions have been engendered with a social meaning. For instance Siegel’s body snatchers were said to represent the Red threat. Ferrara’s version is remarkably apolitical; it focuses on the pure horror of the creepy aliens from outer space. Ferrara did not want to improve on Siegel’s film; he admired it too much. The tone in Ferrara’s case is however much more ominous; the panic-stricken earthlings are helpless in the face of the aliens.
