Invasion of the Body Snatchers - The Final Halloween Horror Movie Post for 2017

Well, we were very ambitious in our viewing list this year, especially considering all the extracurricular activities we had going on in October.  We made it through them all though and with a little time to spare.

As mentioned in previous posts, we had a couple of films that stood out due to either my reactions or my family's (Train to Busan and Black Swan). We had a lot of movies that we'd either seen before or that were good but not good enough to provoke strong reactions either way.  One that we all unanimously thought was brilliant was Get Out.  If you haven't seen that, please seek it out.  I'm not going to go into it here because I don't want to spoil anything but it's up there with the best movies we watched.


After the whole Train to Busan debacle, getting the girls to sit down with me to watch a horror movie was a little more problematic.  I was being questioned on anything they'd never seen before.  God forbid it was something I hadn't seen before either.   If that was the case, my daughter would usually just head upstairs to her room until the credits rolled and my wife would go back to half-watching/half-crafting in the dining room.  The exception to this was any movie in black and white that was filmed prior to 1960.  All I had to do was say, "It's a 1950's movie about..." and they were both in.


On our list there were plenty of those films, but there was one in particular I knew they hadn't seen and knew would get them riled up again.  I'm talking about the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956.  Anyone who tells you that old black and white films just aren't scary has either never seen or has forgotten the first time they watched this movie.

 

Filmed at the height of the Cold War and playing on the fears that there were communists living undercover everywhere in America, Invasion of the Body Snatchers substitutes actual alien invaders for the Reds.  The trick is that they don't look like aliens.  They look like your friends and neighbors and they only barely act differently.  

At the time it was released it was extremely effective.  Even now, it wound up my wife and daughter enough that they couldn't sit still to watch it.  My wife declared that it was "just about at the max of my movie tension level".

I've seen the film easily a dozen times and I still get anxious watching as our hero encounters more and more of his fellow Santa Mira citizens who don't seem to be themselves.  If you're looking for just one more movie to send off Halloween with before you start watching endless holiday themed comedies, make it Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The other films we watched in that last run up to Oct. 31 were:

Twins of Evil
The Creature From The Black Lagoon (in Anaglyph 3D!!!)
Tarantula (A family favorite)
The Fly (1986)
Get Out
The Wolf Man
10 Cloverfield Lane
Plan 9 From Outer Space
Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman
House of Frankenstein
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Trick r' Treat (our annual Halloween-season capper)

I hope you all had a great Halloween!

If you haven't already, check out my author page over at Amazon.  There you can pick up a copy of my new book The Wash, available as both an ebook and in actual, hold it in your hand, physical form!

It's perfect for cozying up by the fire on a fall day or just cozying up to the space heater in your apartment.