Hollywood dipping into its own past for inspiration might be a current trend that shows no signs of slowing down, but it’s not exactly a new one. Sure, we haven’t seen a new spin on the story hit the big screen for 15 years, but there are still four feature-length versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers regardless.
Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers was brought to the screen just one year later in Don Siegel’s classic, setting the benchmark mighty high to begin with. 23 years later, though, Philip Kaufman delivered not just one of the greatest remakes of all-time, but one of cinema’s finest-ever science fiction blockbusters, too.
You’d have thought the ghost would have been given up after that, but Abel Ferrara’s 1993 – and more faithful – Body Snatchers did a sterling job of justifying its existence, but the less said about Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig’s disastrous critical and commercial catastrophe The Invasion from 2008, the better.
There are four movies to choose from, but only one can be deemed the definitive iteration of the extraterrestrial escapade. Depending on who you ask, you may get varying answers – although there’s surely nobody out there rooting for The Invasion – but a Reddit thread has once more stated the case for the 1978 vintage, and it’s very hard to argue.
After all, it’s a classic in its own right that hasn’t been bettered after two additional remakes, and it lived on in popular culture in a way that its predecessor didn’t quite manage, so it’s fully warranted.