This film screened 22nd July 2018.

Screening as part of our Dark Skies: Invasion season July 7th to 29th.

Of the many versions of Jack Finney’s highly influential 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, which sees the populous of San Francisco being replaced by emotionless extra-terrestrial ‘pod people’, Philip Kaufman’s unsettling, atmospheric sci-fi-cum-horror movie is arguably the most successful.

Reconfiguring the cold war communist threat of the source material (and Don Siegel’s 1956 adaptation) to a more downbeat, post-Watergate era of jaded paranoia, the film stars Donald Sutherland as Mathew Bennell, a health inspector who begins to believe that something sinister is afoot when friends and colleagues begin to exhibit strange affectless behaviours.