Don Siegel’s 1956 sci-fi chiller is getting a Halloween re-release. It’s a monochrome nightmare and an ambiguous red-scare allegory. Does it show the virus of communism invading American minds, or the virus of anti-communist complacency and conformity? Or perhaps it is about something else entirely: the eternal horror that can creep over you at any age – perhaps mostly middle age – that your own identity and everyone else’s is just a dream, a fake, an insidious illusion. Kevin McCarthy plays small-town physician Dr Miles Bennell who treats a number of people who have started behaving strangely, claiming their nearest and dearest have been taken over by alien duplicates. But then they suddenly and mysteriously abandon their fears for a bland, dead-eyed avowal that everything is fine after all. A local psychiatrist dismisses these cases as mass hysteria, but Dr Bennell isn’t so sure. It’s a movie that can claim kinship with Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? as well as The Matrix and Under the Skin. The film features an acting cameo from Siegel’s assistant and protege Sam Peckinpah, who also worked on the script, and is known for its high-octane pulp thrills. It should also be praised for elegant satire.
