Now here’s a proper scarer, still potent after nearly 60 years. Don Siegel’s 1956 science-fiction chiller deserves its classic status, with its tale of alien replicas hatching out of pods and replacing small-town Californians. There are several reasons for the film’s success: taut direction, the lack of overtly weird effects and atmospherics, Kevin McCarthy’s authoritative lead, and a magnificently ambivalent ending (given a grimmer tweak in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version, the best of three remakes).
Open to varied political readings, the film has been seen as an expression of anti-communist paranoia, as a critique of that paranoia or as a satire on Eisenhower-era conformism, but its enduring resonance lies in its fable-like simplicity. Watch it in the cinema and you’ll find yourself gazing warily at everyone else in your row.
