Happy Halloween, and to all a good fright! We asked our contributors,
What scary movies do you watch for comfort, not chills, especially at this time of year?
Ever think about your horror DNA? Ancestry kits like 23andme have become popular in recent years, but for my part, genetics doesn’t interest me as much as how I ended up this funky horror freak that I am. It’s sort of impossible to discern what my first horror movie was. That only raises further questions, like “What was the first horror movie I chose to watch myself?” and more tellingly, “What horror movie was on TV when I, an innocent toddler, wandered into the room?” and “What horror movie did I land on while flipping channels (something we used to do back in my day) and find myself unable to look away from?”
It’s hard to answer some of these questions for sure, since they rely solely on my parents’ memories or worse, my own. Nobody else was really studying this stuff at the time. I do know the first movie I ever saw in theaters was THE MUPPET MOVIE. I think, quite honestly, that could explain my love of gigantic monsters. (Remember when Animal goes the full kaiju?) I do remember seeing THE WIZARD OF OZ very early on, at five years old at the latest, and that for sure is a movie that has messed up many minds over the years, although I really don’t feel innately as if that’s one that ever caused me any trouble. I get why people are scared of the flying monkeys, but I always kinda dug ’em. I’m a weirdo.
When I think about what made a kid like me, older than plenty of you but already part of those later generations that zone out at the sight of black and white, so willing and eager to sit for black-and-white legit classics and junk artifacts of yesteryear, I first think of my uncle, who I always did and still do think is just the coolest, and how he always was so enthusiastic about classic movies and what must have had such an impact on my openness to watching them. But I also think about INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.
I first saw INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS on TV. It was airing on The Late Late Show, or something like that. (Again, this is something that used to happen before streaming, before 500 cable channels. Movies aired on local TV and basic cable and sometimes you’d just land on something and watch it.) Why was I up that late? Was it Halloween? I do remember that was probably the night that I totally OD’ed on Chips Ahoy. I ate so many of those goddamn cookies that I couldn’t even look at that blue bag or logo for another three to four years. Maybe the stomachache added to the experience.
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS opens with a frantic and sweaty Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) being restrained by mental health professionals due to his state of agitation, though he swears he isn’t crazy. His hair is wild and spills down all over his forehead, and man, I could almost swear I’ve seen his like somewhere before…
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is a black-and-white movie, and I can’t be sure, but I think now, rewatching it as an adult, there is something that may have kept me watching that is far stupider than anything I have suggested so far. There was one thing I always loved to watch that was in black and white and that I didn’t even need my uncle to hip me to. That thing was the Three Stooges. And no offense to Kevin McCarthy, who was a very handsome man, but in that frenzied state, with all his unslicked black hair down by his brow and his upturned lip, maybe you don’t see the resemblance, but I still see it today…
All of that to say is, whatever the reason that kept me from flipping away from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS to cartoons that night, I was in. I can’t think of any reason for it except that the main character kinda looked like Moe, but something kept me there, and I’m glad I stayed. I do believe it shifted the course of my moviegoing life.
And this is not a movie for kids. Something we have talked about often on this site is the meaning of the term “B-picture.” While now it has very immediate connotations of schlock and scuzziness, in the old Hollywood days it was meant to refer to lower budgets and less high-profile stars. That’s it. A B-picture wasn’t inherently lesser by way of quality. It just wasn’t the marquee attraction. Hollywood pictures with classic Hollywood stars were the draw; B-movies were the undercard. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS had pedigree, and even moreso in retrospect. The screenwriter, sometimes a novelist, was Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote the stone-classic film noir OUT OF THE PAST. The director was Don Siegel, most famous now (if at all) for his collaborations with Clint Eastwood, most notably DIRTY HARRY. At this point, Siegel had been making noir films (and some Westerns!), including the terrific THE BIG STEAL, also written by Mainwaring.
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS plays, in that light, as more of a noir than a sci-fi film or a horror film. Like so many classic noir films, like OUT OF THE PAST to name just one, it starts in bright, seemingly happy day, and takes us deep into the dark night. Dr. Miles Bennell gets back to town from a business trip and reconnects with a former flame (played by Dana Wynter) even as life in the fictional California town of Santa Mira is beginning to seem off around them. These are grown adults with grown concerns: Miles is a busy small-town doctor and Becky is coming back off a divorce. THE BLOB (1958) is about teens. This is about grown-ups. (Not that stories about young people can’t be just as serious; but in the 1950s, cinematic expectations were often different.)
By now you know the story, even if you haven’t seen the movie. People continue complaining to Miles that their loved ones aren’t their loved ones, even though they look and sound exactly as if they are. At first Miles suspects a mass delusion, but fairly quickly, it becomes clear that people in Santa Mira are being replaced by exact facsimiles, hatched from gooey pods. Upon the rewatch I did for this piece, I was surprised at just how quickly the big ‘secret’ is revealed. There’s a fair amount of time in the picture before we see the first pod, but once we do see it, things escalate in what feels like a snap.
When one falls asleep, one is replaced by “the pod people.” The premise has been so thoroughly absorbed by pop culture that it’s easy to lose sight of its elemental power. Watching the movie again, knowing that inevitably the story will end with Miles running out towards oncoming cars, screaming at them to “Turn around!” but knowing with a lifetime of movies in our heads that humanity never listens until it’s too late, there is a sense of desperation. But to me, there’s also a cold comfort.
I’m not going to get too far up my ass talking about how all the cinematic allegories of the past are playing out to the letter today. It’s true, but you’ve read it all already from writers with more Pulitzer Prizes than me. About the pandemic, about just about everything in 2022 America, I am inclined to repeat the following:
Tonight I went to see DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) in 3-D. Annual reminder that George A. Romero was right about everything. ???? pic.twitter.com/Ct5FN0LIVZ
— Jon Abrams (@RealJonAbrams) October 29, 2022
I have written on this site before about how movies like DAWN OF THE DEAD comfort me by reminding me to keep fighting when all seems lost, even when all probably is lost. I have written far less about how movies like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS have made their way into my DNA, and that’s because it’s depressing as shit to say so. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS confirms to me what I fear to speak aloud, but what I know to be true. Loss is painful no matter what, but in grief there always lives love. Sometimes you lose people in the scariest way. Sometimes you lose people who are still there, but no longer themselves. A longtime friend of mine has gone all the way down the QAnon rabbithole. This friend won’t speak to me now, based upon arguments we have never actually had. This friend probably knows that I am fiercely anti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQIA, pro-science, but knows I have always been those things. I haven’t changed. This friend has changed. The voice sounds the same, but the talking points, the “Why are you so angry? I’m not angry at you” sotto voce false fronts, the absolute gaslighting, it’s all been scripted by someone else. The friend I knew is still there, but also not there. I will still love my friend, but I don’t love whoever wrote that script. Movies like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS comfort me not because they assure me that I will prevail, since in this case I’m not counting a single chicken there, but because they remind me that at the very least, I’m not alone in seeing what I see, in what I know.
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Tags: 31 flavors of horror, Aliens, California, Carmen Dragon, Carolyn Jones, Comfort Horror, Dabbs Greer, Dana Wynter, Daniel Mainwaring, Don Siegel, Ellsworth Fredericks, Horror, Jack Finney, Jean Willes, Kevin McCarthy, King Donovan, Larry Gates, Richard Collins, Richard Deacon, Robert S. Eisen, Sam Peckinpah, Sci-Fi, Superscope, The 1950s, Walter Wanger, Whit Bissell
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