Invasion of The Body Snatchers - Themes

Themes

Some reviewers found a comment on the dangers faced of America turning a blind eye to McCarthyism, or of bland conformity in postwar Eisenhower-era America. Others have viewed it as an allegory for the loss of personal autonomy in the Soviet Union or communist systems in general. For the BBC, David Wood summarised the circulating popular interpretations of the film as follows: "The sense of post-war, anti-communist paranoia is acute, as is the temptation to view the film as a metaphor for the tyranny of the McCarthy era." Danny Peary in Cult Movies pointed out that the addition of the framing story had changed the film's stance from anti-McCarthyite to anti-communist.

In W.S. Poole's Monsters in America, the film is argued to be an indictment of the damage to the human personality caused by reductionist modern ideologies both of the Right and the Left. In An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Carlos Clarens saw a trend manifesting itself in Science Fiction films, dealing with dehumanization and fear of the loss of individual identity, being historically connected to the end of "the Korean War and the well publicized reports coming out of it of brainwashing techniques". Comparing Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, Brian Neve found a sense of disillusionment rather than straightforward messages, with all three films being "less radical in any positive sense than reflective of the decline of great liberal hopes".

Despite the general agreement among film critics regarding these political connotations of the film, lead actor Kevin McCarthy said in an interview included on the 1998 DVD release that he felt no political allegory was intended. The interviewer stated that he had spoken with the author of the original novel, Jack Finney, who also professed to have intended no specific political allegory in the work.

In his autobiography, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, Walter Mirisch writes: "People began to read meanings into pictures that were never intended. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an example of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney, nor myself saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple."

Don Siegel spoke more openly of an existing allegorical subtext, but denied a strictly political point of view: " I felt that this was a very important story. I think that the world is populated by pods and I wanted to show them. I think so many people have no feeling about cultural things, no feeling of pain, of sorrow. The political reference to Senator McCarthy and totalitarianism was inescapable but I tried not to emphasize it because I feel that motion pictures are primarily to entertain and I did not want to preach."