Body Snatchers

Suffused with an overwhelming sense of dread and the director’s signature psychosexual pyrotechnics, Ferrara’s idiosyncratic reworking of Don Siegel’s Cold War–era classic remains the most underappreciated of all the body-snatcher movies. The teenage heroine Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) moves to an Alabama military base when her father, an EPA agent (Terry Kinney), is dispatched to investigate the side effects of the army’s mysterious experiments. The emergence of the soulless, ill-intentioned “pod people” and the subsequent betrayals and abandonments are all the more acute for taking place largely within the domestic sphere, as Ferrara brilliantly applies the original’s critique of conformity to the sacrosanct institutions of the American nuclear family and the American military. Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) and Larry Cohen (The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover) both had a hand in writing the memorably creepy script, based on Jack Finney’s endlessly adaptable novel.