ABSTRACT
One of the most successful horror movies of the 1950s, the era when horror movies really came into their own in the United States, was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This 1956 film explores a world in which aliens from outer space invade earth by replacing human beings with new bodies that look just like them, but that are devoid of real human emotion. It’s typically interpreted today as a Cold War allegory on either the threat of McCarthyism in the United States, or the dangers posed by the loss of individuality in the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, another horror film, The Stepford Wives, took the idea of body replacement one step further. Stepford, an “idyllic” suburban community in Connecticut, only appears to be perfect; it turns out that the husbands in the town have been killing their wives and replacing them with robots who look exactly like them, but are perfectly submissive, and thus (from the perspective of the men) are perfect wives. This film was made during the rise of feminism in the United States, and is clearly a statement about male fear during the era of women’s liberation. Over the decades, a number of other films have also featured humans being taken over or assimilated by other life forms. In all of these cases, the films focus squarely on the body.
