Pod People (Invasion of the Body Snatchers)
Encyclopedia
Pod people is a nickname given to an alien species featured in the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers
by Jack Finney
, the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 remake of the same name
and the 1993 film Body Snatchers
.
originating from a now dying planet
. Realizing that it was only a matter of time before the planet's resources would be completely depleted, the pods somehow evolved the ability to defy gravity and leave their planet's atmosphere in the search of a new world to colonize. For millennia, the pods floated in space like spores, propelled by the solar winds
, some occasionally landing on inhabited planets. Once there, they would replace the dominant species by spawning emotionless replicas; the original bodies would then disintegrate into dust once the duplication process was completed. They would then consume all of the planet's resources, only to then leave in search of yet another new world. Such a consumption was apparently the fate of the civilizations that once inhabited Mars and the Moon. The Pods' sole purpose in life was that of individual survival, with no attention given to the civilizations they conquered or the resources they squandered. The duplicates had lifespans of only five years, and could not sexually reproduce. Their invasion of Earth
was short-lived: unable to tolerate the sheer determination humanity displayed in defense, the Pods abandoned the planet, leaving behind a small population of duplicates, who died shortly after.
, gets away from the town and tells his story to a psychiatrist. A truck carrying pods is involved in an accident; thereafter the psychiatrist believes the story. He then asks the FBI and police
to quarantine
the town. The audience is left to only wonder whether they were successful or not. The original ending was less hopeful about the fate of humanity, ending before McCarthy escapes to a psychiatrist. The final shot is of him standing in the middle of a highway shouting warnings at passing cars and then directly at the camera.
and become pink flowers; the aliens eventually begin growing the larger, 6 feet (1.8 m) pods. This time, those subverted can scream in a creepy high-pitched alien voice
, which is apparently used to alert other pod people of humans in their midst who have not yet been taken over. They also seem to exhibit a kind of extra-sensory perception
. When one character stabs his almost formed pod double, another pod person immediately emits the alien scream.
This version does not end with the same hope
with which the novel
and previous movie do, but ends with the pod people taking over almost everyone on Earth
. The movie shows several ships being stockpiled with pods to be sent out into other parts of the world. In the very last scene, Veronica Cartwright
's character is happy to see the hero, played by Donald Sutherland
, only to hear him emit the alien scream. It is thereby implied that despite their best efforts, they were unable to stop the alien force, and that Earth is apparently doomed.
There is a difference in the pods between the original film and the remake. In the original, the pods burst open and begin duplicating Miles and his friends while they are wide awake. In the remake, the pods and flowers stay dormant until the humans are asleep.
. The aliens then vomit a gelatinous substance into liquids to help the invasion continue. When the invasion gains considerable strength, the pod people transform humans by directly injecting them with the substance, under the guise of "influenza vaccines". As it continues across the globe, entire world conflicts are resolved, including the Iraq War and Darfur
. However, it is discovered that people who had certain illnesses during childhood were completely immune to the virus. A vaccine is created and the entire pandemic is cured within a year; those infected, after being treated, are unable to remember events during their infection, "as though they were in a deep sleep". Similar to previous incarnations, the virus can kill its human host. This is hinted at when Carol takes a picture of a human being converted and sends him into cardiac arrest. It is actually evidenced during Carol and Gene's exchange on the commuter train:
film by The Asylum
- which was a mockbuster
released alongside The Invasion
- the aliens designate themselves as "Pod People", and hatch from large, egg-like forms rather than organic seed-pods. Like the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they arrive in an isolated town and take the form of the townsfolk, whilst at the same time delivering more pods to other nearby towns and cities to aid their colonisation of the Earth.
The Body Snatchers
The Body Snatchers is a 1955 science fiction novel by Jack Finney, originally serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954, which describes the fictional town of Santa Mira, California being invaded by seeds that have drifted to Earth from space...
by Jack Finney
Jack Finney
Jack Finney was an American author. His best-known works are science fiction and thrillers, including The Body Snatchers and Time and Again. The former was the basis for the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes.-Biography:Finney was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and given the...
, the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 remake of the same name
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 film)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1978 science fiction film based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. It is a remake of the 1956 film of the same name. It was directed by Philip Kaufman and starred Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams and Leonard Nimoy.A San Francisco health inspector and...
and the 1993 film Body Snatchers
Body Snatchers (1993 film)
Body Snatchers is a 1993 American science fiction horror film and loosely based on the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. The film was directed by Abel Ferrara, starring Gabrielle Anwar, Billy Wirth, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, R...
.
History from the novel
The Pod People are a race of nomadic, extraterrestrial parasitesParasitism
Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host. Traditionally parasite referred to organisms with lifestages that needed more than one host . These are now called macroparasites...
originating from a now dying planet
Planet
A planet is a celestial body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals.The term planet is ancient, with ties to history, science,...
. Realizing that it was only a matter of time before the planet's resources would be completely depleted, the pods somehow evolved the ability to defy gravity and leave their planet's atmosphere in the search of a new world to colonize. For millennia, the pods floated in space like spores, propelled by the solar winds
Solar Winds
Solar Winds I & II were top down, space-based action games released in the early-1990s.In Solar Winds, you are Jake Stone, a bounty hunter who, through several missions, uncovers a secret coalition between the government of your home solar system and a race of unidentified aliens...
, some occasionally landing on inhabited planets. Once there, they would replace the dominant species by spawning emotionless replicas; the original bodies would then disintegrate into dust once the duplication process was completed. They would then consume all of the planet's resources, only to then leave in search of yet another new world. Such a consumption was apparently the fate of the civilizations that once inhabited Mars and the Moon. The Pods' sole purpose in life was that of individual survival, with no attention given to the civilizations they conquered or the resources they squandered. The duplicates had lifespans of only five years, and could not sexually reproduce. Their invasion of Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
was short-lived: unable to tolerate the sheer determination humanity displayed in defense, the Pods abandoned the planet, leaving behind a small population of duplicates, who died shortly after.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 film)
One of the pod people hints at their extraterrestrial origin and purpose without fully explaining it. In the end the hero, played by Kevin McCarthyKevin McCarthy (actor)
Kevin McCarthy was an American stage, film, and television actor, who appeared in over two hundred television and film roles. For his role in the 1951 film version of Death of a Salesman, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and won a Golden Globe Award for New Star of...
, gets away from the town and tells his story to a psychiatrist. A truck carrying pods is involved in an accident; thereafter the psychiatrist believes the story. He then asks the FBI and police
Police
The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...
to quarantine
Quarantine
Quarantine is compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning forty-day period....
the town. The audience is left to only wonder whether they were successful or not. The original ending was less hopeful about the fate of humanity, ending before McCarthy escapes to a psychiatrist. The final shot is of him standing in the middle of a highway shouting warnings at passing cars and then directly at the camera.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 film)
The origin of the Pod People clones in the 1978 film remains the same, though again only suggested. In this film, we see the aliens in their pre-invasion form. They appear as gelatinous creatures who abandon their dying world somewhere in deep space. Once they land on Earth, they assimilate leavesLeaf
A leaf is an organ of a vascular plant, as defined in botanical terms, and in particular in plant morphology. Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves as a feature of plants....
and become pink flowers; the aliens eventually begin growing the larger, 6 feet (1.8 m) pods. This time, those subverted can scream in a creepy high-pitched alien voice
Voice
Voice may refer to:* Human voice* Voice control or voice activation* Writer's voice* Voice acting* Voice vote* Voice message-In film:* Voice , a 2005 South Korean film* The Voice , a 2010 Turkish horror film directed by Ümit Ünal...
, which is apparently used to alert other pod people of humans in their midst who have not yet been taken over. They also seem to exhibit a kind of extra-sensory perception
Extra-sensory perception
Extrasensory perception involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind. The term was coined by Frederic Myers, and adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairaudience, and...
. When one character stabs his almost formed pod double, another pod person immediately emits the alien scream.
This version does not end with the same hope
Hope
Hope is the emotional state which promotes the belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. It is the "feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best" or the act of "look[ing] forward to with desire and reasonable confidence" or...
with which the novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
and previous movie do, but ends with the pod people taking over almost everyone on Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
. The movie shows several ships being stockpiled with pods to be sent out into other parts of the world. In the very last scene, Veronica Cartwright
Veronica Cartwright
Veronica A. Cartwright is an English-born American actress who has worked mainly in American film and television. She is best known for her role of Lambert in Alien, for which she won a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress....
's character is happy to see the hero, played by Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, only to hear him emit the alien scream. It is thereby implied that despite their best efforts, they were unable to stop the alien force, and that Earth is apparently doomed.
There is a difference in the pods between the original film and the remake. In the original, the pods burst open and begin duplicating Miles and his friends while they are wide awake. In the remake, the pods and flowers stay dormant until the humans are asleep.
Body Snatchers (1993 film)
As with the 1978 film, these pod people emit the same high-pitched scream to indicate non-converts among them. Their extraterrestrial origin is hinted at even less (only suggested through a pan-in of the galaxy during the opening credits). These pod-people also shrivel and disintegrate when they are killed, just like the bodies of the originals. As with the 1978 remake, this version seems to preclude any hopeful conclusion by the ambiguous ending in which the two leads land after seemingly destroying the pod people, only to find that the pilot who helped them land is apparently one of the aliens, reflecting back to the eerie warning earlier stated: "There's no one like you left."The Invasion (2007 film)
In The Invasion, the invaders are changed from pods to an alien virus that is contracted through liquids. Once the person falls asleep, the virus rewrites human DNADNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
. The aliens then vomit a gelatinous substance into liquids to help the invasion continue. When the invasion gains considerable strength, the pod people transform humans by directly injecting them with the substance, under the guise of "influenza vaccines". As it continues across the globe, entire world conflicts are resolved, including the Iraq War and Darfur
Darfur
Darfur is a region in western Sudan. An independent sultanate for several hundred years, it was incorporated into Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1916. The region is divided into three federal states: West Darfur, South Darfur, and North Darfur...
. However, it is discovered that people who had certain illnesses during childhood were completely immune to the virus. A vaccine is created and the entire pandemic is cured within a year; those infected, after being treated, are unable to remember events during their infection, "as though they were in a deep sleep". Similar to previous incarnations, the virus can kill its human host. This is hinted at when Carol takes a picture of a human being converted and sends him into cardiac arrest. It is actually evidenced during Carol and Gene's exchange on the commuter train:
Invasion of the Pod People
In the 20072007 in film
This is a list of major films released in 2007.-Top grossing films:Please note that following the tradition of the English-language film industry, these are the top grossing films that were first released in the USA in 2007...
film by The Asylum
The Asylum
The Asylum is an American film studio and distributor which focuses on producing low-budget, usually direct-to-video productions. The studio has produced titles that capitalize on productions by major studios; these titles have been dubbed "mockbusters" by the press.-History:The Asylum was founded...
- which was a mockbuster
Mockbuster
A mockbuster is a film created with the apparent intention of piggy-backing on the publicity of a major film with a similar title or theme and are often made with a low budget. Often these films are created to be released direct-to-video at the same time as the mainstream film reaches theaters or...
released alongside The Invasion
The Invasion (film)
The Invasion is a 2007 science fiction thriller film starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, with additional scenes written by the Wachowski brothers and directed by James McTeigue....
- the aliens designate themselves as "Pod People", and hatch from large, egg-like forms rather than organic seed-pods. Like the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they arrive in an isolated town and take the form of the townsfolk, whilst at the same time delivering more pods to other nearby towns and cities to aid their colonisation of the Earth.