Invasion of the Body Snatchers

by Jack Finney

A psychiatrist, Dr. Hill (Whit Bissell), is called to the emergency room of a California hospital, where a highly agitated man is being held in custody. Dr. Hill agrees to listen to his story. The man identifies himself as a doctor, and recounts, in flashback, the events leading up to his arrest and arrival at the hospital.

In the nearby town of Santa Mira, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) sees a number of patients apparently suffering from Capgras delusion, the belief that their relatives have somehow been replaced with identical-looking impostors.

Returning from a trip, Miles meets his former girlfriend, Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), who has recently come back to town after a divorce. Becky's cousin Wilma (Virginia Christine) expresses the same fear about her Uncle Ira, with whom she lives. Psychiatrist Dr. Dan Kauffman (Larry Gates) assures Bennell that these cases are merely an "epidemic of mass hysteria".

That evening, Miles and Becky are urgently called to the home of Bennell's friend, Jack Belicec (King Donovan), who has found what appears to be a dead body in his home. Inexplicably, the body has no discernible facial features or fingerprints but, to their horror, within a short period of time it begins to take on the exact physical features of Belicec. Later, another body is found in Becky's basement that is her exact duplicate. When Bennell calls Dr. Kauffman to the scene, the bodies have mysteriously disappeared, and Kauffman tells Bennell that he is falling for the same hysteria.

The following night, Bennell, Becky, Jack, and Jack's wife Teddy (Carolyn Jones) again find duplicates of themselves, emerging from giant seed pods in Bennell's greenhouse. They conclude that the townspeople are being replaced while asleep with exact physical copies. Bennell tries to make a long-distance call to federal authorities for help, but the phone operator claims that the long distance lines are all busy and the call can't be put through, so Jack and Teddy drive off to seek help in the next town. Bennell and Becky soon realize that all of the town's inhabitants have been replaced and are devoid of any sort of humanity. They hide at Bennell's office for the night, vowing to stay awake so as not to be replaced by their duplicates.

The next morning, Bennell and Becky watch from the office window as truckloads of the giant pods arrive in the town center. They listen as Nick Grivett (the chief of police) (Ralph Dumke) directs the others to take them to neighboring towns to be planted and used to replace their populations. Kauffman and Belicec, both of whom are now also "pod people", arrive at Bennell's office with new pods for Becky and Bennell. They reveal that an extraterrestrial life form is responsible for the invasion and that the pods, capable of replicating any life form, traveled through space and landed in a field. After their takeover, Kauffman explains, humanity will lose all emotions and sense of individuality, creating a simplistic, stress-free, superior world.

After scuffling with and knocking out the aliens (Kauffman, Belicec, and Grivett), Bennell and Becky escape from the office. Outside, they pretend to be emotionless pod people but Becky screams when she sees a dog dart out into traffic, her reaction exposing their humanity. A town alarm is sounded and the couple flee on foot, pursued by a mob of pod people.

Exhausted, they manage to escape and hide in an abandoned mine outside town, struggling to stay awake so their bodies won't be taken over. Later, they hear music, and Bennell leaves Becky briefly to investigate. Over a hill, he sees a large greenhouse farm with hundreds of giant seed pods being loaded onto trucks. Bennell returns to tell Becky, and upon kissing her, he realizes, to his horror, that she fell asleep before he returned and is now one of them. Becky sounds the alarm as Bennell runs away. He is again chased by the mob, and eventually finds himself on a crowded highway. After seeing a transport truck bound for San Francisco and Los Angeles filled with the pods, he frantically screams at the passing motorists, "They're here already! You're next! You're next!" The flashback ends with Bennell finishing his story back at the hospital. Dr. Hill and the on-duty doctor step outside the room, the latter expressing his certainty that Bennell is psychotic. Just then, a truck driver is wheeled into the hall on a gurney after having been badly injured in an accident. The orderly tells the doctors that the man had to be dug out from under a load of giant pods coming from Santa Mira. Now finally believing Bennell's story, Dr. Hill calls for the police to block the roads in and out of Santa Mira while he alerts the FBI.