Invasion of the Body Snatchers/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: The number of people who've seen the movies dwarf the number who've read the book quite handily.
  • Downer Ending: Oh, boy.
    • But not in the book, where the pods leave for space because Earth people are willing to fight right up until the last minute.
    • Also not in the 2007 version, when a cure is discovered in time.
      • Also not in the 1956 version, although, like it states below, this was a result of Executive Meddling.
  • Fan Dumb: Do not bring up any version of this movie on SF boards unless you want to hear a diatribe from five different people about how one version was the best, or they all suck and Jack Finney's novel is superior.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • In the original film, Miles kissing his wife, and she's one of THEM.
    • The 1993 version has similar effects for most of the main victims when they disintegrate, and while they don't quite have the creep-out factor of the preceding version, they're still pretty discomforting to watch.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Have your friends and loved ones been acting strangely lately? How strangely? By the way, if you fall asleep you might be replaced by an alien doppelganger. FYI.
  • Retroactive Recognition: That suspicious meter-reader in the original film? He's played by Sam Peckinpah, who later directed such films as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs.
  • Uncanny Valley
    • In-universe as well, at least in the original. The duplicates look like, sound like, act like and have all the memories of the original, but their close relatives know something is wrong.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not Political?: The original. The star and the director repeatedly insisted that they were all just making a sci-fi movie, not a social commentary.
    • Averted by the 2007 version, which was pretty heavily political, but surprisingly not the case with the '90s adaptation.