When Philip Kaufman announced he was adapting Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, it seemed a doomed endeavor. After all, how could you top the 1956 film version, with its creeping paranoia and that indelible image of Kevin McCarthy running down the highway, desperately trying to warn passersby that they were being replaced by interstellar pod people? Kaufman replied by ramping up the horror of not knowing if the person next to you is who they say they are, and by giving the great Donald Sutherland the role of a lifetime as a researcher who helps uncover that plan. And as for his own final, unforgettable image, that’s seared into horror history as much as McCarthy. – Richard Whittaker
