Details, credits, errata: Welcome back! We took a break and now are thrilled to return to you with a new episode about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake, and guest Jeff VanderMeer, short-story writer and novelist whose masterly book Annihilation got made into a terrific movie by Alex Garland and whose books Hummingbird Salamander and A Peculiar Peril are both very well-reviewed (and good!) and available at Midtown Reader signed and inscribed, should you so choose, by the author himself.
This movie has been made a few times! The original was made in 1956 by Don Siegel, two years after Jack Finney’s novel of the same name was published (our image on the website is a detail from the cover to the 1967 Dell edition). Finney revised the novel the year the Kaufman movie came out, and the story was officially adapted again in 1993, as Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers, and in 2007 as The Invasion. It’s also the basis for a fun and trashy Robert Rodriguez 1990’s high school flick called The Faculty.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is copyright 1978 United Artists. Brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review. All other material is copyright 2021 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
This is a free episode! We’d love it if you subscribed!
Vol. 2, no. 1: Resting Pod Face