Popular wisdom holds that Don Siegal's original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was meant to represent Cold War hysteria, which was at it's peak during those years of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee. It's even possible to see where that idea might apply.
Such a limited interpretation of the spinechilling classic, however, fails to explain why it still works on a generation that wouldn't know Tailgunner Joe from Johnny Bravo. The image of those giant green pods--and you can tell they're green even in black and white--popping open and spewing their foamy white contents that quickly take on human shape is always guaranteed to cause a shudder. And that moment when Becky Driscoll opens her eyes and you know the lights are on but nobody's home--well, you don't have to even know what a Bolshevik is to have that one send a sharp stab to your middle.
Certainly Jack Finney, who wrote the original novel as a serial for Collier's, had no such ulterior motive.
"...I simply felt in the mood to write something about a strange event or a series of them in a small town; something inexplicable," he told Stephen King for Danse Macabre. "...[I]t was just a story meant to entertain, and with no more meaning than that."
I suspect that the real reason this story still resonates nearly a half-century later is that its real theme is not Communism but the loss of individual identity, an element that got rather lost in the shuffle of Philip Kaufman's 1978 version. There, the original sense of horror tends to get buried under all the satirical pop culture references. Small towns are curious social entities. They are, of course, notorious for their lack of privacy--everybody knows everyone else and everyone else's business. Yet that very lack of privacy tends to encourage small-town dwellers to develop a kind of interior individualism. That doesn't mean "what the neighbors think" doesn't matter. Rather, it means they develop a kind of intuitive sense for recognizing the different, the strange, the one who doesn't quite belong. It's likely the reason why even the outsider who has lived in a small town for twenty or thirty years is never quite "one of us."
