Maddrey picks up my Body Snatchers slack!

Hey everyone,

Sorry for the paucity of posts here this week. As some of you may know, we at the Lulu Show LLC are currently in pre-production on season three of The House Between - my online sci-fi drama that made a splash this winter during the new and improved second season. Anyway, we start principal photography in something like 11 days, and I'm still polishing the last three stories. Cripes!

Anyway, while I anxiously and frenetically pound out the continuing adventures of the (surviving...) denizens at the universe, my producer Joseph Maddrey (author of Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film), has taken up the gauntlet and continued the bloggy discussion of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers franchise, in particular the 1978 version.

Here's a bit of Joe's insightful commentary (but read the whole piece...):

"From my perspective, Invasion of the Body Snatchers became a series in 1993, with the release of Abel Ferrara's screen adaptation. It is not the kind of series that I was familiar with as a child of the 80s – a Hollywood franchise spitting out formulaic sequels. Instead, it is a constantly evolving myth along the lines of George Romero’s Dead series, where new characters and new perspectives consistently overwhelm the basic plot. But that almost wasn’t the case.

Producer Robert Solo bought the sequel rights to Don Siegel’s original film in the early 1970s, when big-budget science-fiction films and remakes of low-budget horror films were practically unheard of. His initial plan was to tell the same story with updated special effects. Luckily, writer W.D. Richter and director Philip Kaufman had other plans. They didn’t want to remake the original film; they wanted to “re-imagine” it, creating a “variation on the original theme.” Today, this distinction is a running gag – every writer, producer and director in Hollywood uses the word “re-imagination” as an excuse to make money off of someone else’s older, better ideas – but “re-imagination” is nevertheless an apt way to characterize Invasion ’78. In Kaufman’s film, the people, places, and pods have evolved just as much as the special effects… giving the already-famous story a new subtext.

Donald Sutherland fills Kevin McCarthy’s shoes as Dr. Bennell (now named Matthew instead of Miles), and he’s much closer to Finney’s original conception of the character: passionate and goofy enough to be in stark contrast with the emotionless pod people. One of the most effective scenes in the film comes when he and Elizabeth Driscoll (played by beautiful girl-next-door Brooke Adams) are having a late-night dinner; Matthew’s main goal in this scene is to make Elizabeth happy, for her sake rather than his own. When she laughs, we can’t help but love them both. Likewise, we gradually learn to love their eccentric friends Jack and Nancy Bellicec, because they’re considerate and idealistic and… well, fun. In short: The film does a masterful job of emphasizing that the struggle between these characters and the pods is a struggle between the human and dehumanizing aspects of the everyday world they live in..."