Every Version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Philip Kaufman's 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the rare remakes that surpasses its source. Where Siegel's film is tight and urgent, Kaufman's is queasy and slow-building, soaked in the distrust that saturated American life after Vietnam and Watergate. Donald Sutherland's final shot is one of the great gut-punch endings in horror cinema. The film also features a clever cameo from Kevin McCarthy, reprising his panicked highway run from the original, passing the baton across generations. If you only watch one version, watch this one.

Abel Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers is regularly overlooked because it had a troubled release and a title stripped of its franchise name. That is a mistake. Moving the story to an army base is a genuine conceptual coup: the military is already a conformity machine, so the pods barely need to change anything. Meg Tilly's alien monologue, delivered in a flat, affectless murmur, is the most purely terrifying scene in the entire franchise. It deserves reappraisal.

The 2007 Invasion has a great cast (Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeffrey Wright) and a genuinely interesting update, recasting the pods as a pathogen spread through bodily fluid during sleep. But the film was taken away from director Oliver Hirschbiegel and substantially reshot by the Wachowskis, and the seams show badly. What remains is a tonally fractured action movie that does not trust its own creepiest ideas. Watch it after the other three to understand how much can go wrong when a studio panics.