Horror is about that cackling outsider, scratching at your door. The question in the genre is always which side of the portal you’re on. Are you with the community, fighting the threat? Or are you rooting for the monster to break through and savage the dull weight of ordinariness?
From that perspective, Don Siegel’s 1956 film
The Witch, which turns 5, are ugly, oozing mirror images.
Body Snatchers is about how evil alien pod people infiltrate the small, wholesome 1950s California town of Santa Mira.
The Witch is about a good, wholesome, God-fearing family in the 1630s and how much fun it is when their daughter gets to abandon their boring hypocrisy to join a bacchanal of witches. You could argue that between 1956 and 2016, good, wholesome Americanism started to look less heroic and more like death. Eggers’ witches are Siegel’s aliens, but with better PR.
The Body Snatchers was published during the height of McCarthyism.
However, its rather inconspicuous author largely dispelled notions that it was an allegory on communism or the importance of individuality. Nevertheless, considering the times, it wasn’t exactly irrational to propose such an analysis. Even if it was unconscious on the author’s behalf, the story’s proposed political undertones have subsequently allowed generations of filmmakers to creatively reinterpret it to reflect their individual eras. Finney had tapped into the paranoia of an era and a very primal fear concerning the loss of human identity.
This is the crux of Don Siegel’s still chilling small-town set 1956 original adaptation
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