ON THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … a special treat … I rewatched a sci fi horror film about alien doppelgängers that I love: Invaders from Mars. Actually, in a double feature, I rewatched both the 1953 original version by William Cameron Menzies and the 1986 remake by masters of horror Tobe Hooper and Dan O'Bannon.
In both, the main character is a young boy who witnesses an alien ship land over the hill outside his window. The remake reproduces the original’s spooky hill design exactly: a winding path bordered by a wooden fence leads to a high rounded crest that obscures everything beyond it. The boy’s parents leave to investigate this, and they return changed. They look the same, but their minds are Martian. The imposters begin leading others over the hill. The boy struggles to convince unconverted adults that he is not just telling a made-up story from a sci fi movie. His town is quickly overrun with fakes. Luckily, before it’s too late, he finds a nurse who believes him and helps him alert the military.
Well, kind of.
At the climactic moment when the final attack is about to destroy the Martian ship, the boy wakes up in his bed. He runs to his parents’ bedroom to find that they are back to normal. It was all nightmare, his father reassures him. However, back in bed, the boy hears the same strange thunder storm from the opening begin again. The boy goes to the window and watches the alien craft land behind the hill, just as before. What the boy had experienced was not a nightmare after all but a premonition. We are left to wonder if perhaps this time it won’t be so easy for the boy to find such competent, trusting adults.
A movie about aliens replacing people and a paranoid protagonist attempting to warn those who are still human may sound like a knock-off of the much better known Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In fact, Invaders from Mars preceded Body Snatchers by three years. (Albeit, Heinlein’s novel The Puppet Masters was published before both.) Although Body Snatchers, particularly in its 1978 iteration, is probably the superior work on the theme, I find Invaders from Mars’ eerie final twist, along with its depiction of the acute helplessness of a child whose parents have been replaced, to be more haunting.
Let’s compare the twin renditions. The original is starker. Its replica people act more brutally robotic; it has a more steely blue color palette; and it opens with narration not found in the remake about how “the heavens have kept a secret.” The remake, meanwhile, is more psychological. It shows more of the boy’s warm relationship with his parents in order to put them in sharper relief with the versions who return from over the hill. The Martian doubles are less robotic, instead displaying sinister quirks. The remake also adds a creepy scene where a teacher played by Louise Fletcher is discovered eating a frog intended for class dissection.
By the same point in the original, the boy has already found two adults in authority who believe him and remain his guardians until the end. Together the trio quickly glean what’s happening and manage to alert the Pentagon. This results in a massive military mobilization against the invaders, seemingly within the hour. Most of the second act involves the military troubleshooting how best to blow up the Martians. In contrast, the remake affords the one adult who listens to the boy, a nurse played by scream queen Karen Black, much less power. The pair spend the second act hunted by doppelgänger police. This leads to a tense scene in which the boy explores the tunnels dug by the Martians on his own. In the original, a team of soldiers are the first ones to enter the tunnels. So, overall, the remake is much less trusting in the protection of established American institutions. There’s even a delightfully cynical moment where a cop preparing to murder a child in cold blood says with a smile, “It’s okay, we’re the police. We’re here to help.”
In both, though, getting the military to act and save the day seems a little too easy, almost like a boy’s fantasy of what would happen. The boy’s hope for an easy solution could be taking over the narrative from the genuine premonitory content of his dream. The remake retains the same ending, with the boy seeing the same Martian landing event from his dream, confirming that it was a premonition and not merely a nightmare. But it adds a final shot where the boy opens the door to his parents’ bedroom and sees something that makes him scream in horror—cut to black.
The only other major difference is that the creature effects are much more primitive in the original. The remake has awesome shark-mawed drones on spindly legs (made by Stan Winston). There is an uncanniness to the simplicity of the original’s designs that’s a bit lost in all the veiny details of the remake’s monsters, though.
I also appreciate that the remake retains the Martian origin of the invaders. With increased interplanetary exploration and a constant robotic presence on the surface of Mars, audiences have become more skeptical that an alien species visiting Earth would originate from our own solar system. But it’s actually far more likely that any biological species with technology at all comparable to our own, not to mention one having the motivation of planetary conquest, would come from our system. The reason is that interstellar travel within the lifespan of an organic species is impossible without the god-like ability to bend time and space. Relative to this, creating our own Earth-like planets out of cosmic dust would be a trivial task—thereby taking away the motivation to conquer other species, as well as the need to resort to infiltration to accomplish said conquest. Consider, if we were to prove the existence of a civilization in a nearby star system, we would lack the means to inflict harm on them, even if for some insane reason we wanted to, within any of our lifetimes—and likely this will remain true far into the future. However, if we were to prove the existence of a subterranean civilization on one of the moons of Jupiter (something not outside the realm of possibility), we could launch a mission to infiltrate this civilization within the decade.
Anyway … how both the original Invaders from Mars and the remake relate to our theme, TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS, is fairly straightforward. These are the classic doppelgängers of myth reimagined as alien imposters, best known as “pod people” thanks to the aforementioned Body Snatchers. A real psychiatric disorder called Capgras delusion causes people to believe that a pod people scenario has in fact occurred, such that their family members or close friends have been replaced by identical duplicates. While no change is detected on the surface, according to those suffering from the delusion, something is “off” about the person. It’s believed that this delusion is caused by a failure in the brain to connect visual recognition of a face with emotional identification of the person behind the face. Moreover, this delusion can take on a political dimension in that paranoia about ideological infiltration, which was particularly rampant during the Cold War, can lead people to believe that apparently ordinary members of a community are secretly evil terrorists. On occasion, though, as we have seen with recent white supremacist massacres, this belief turns out to be true. Meanwhile, radical internal changes can sometimes actually result in a new identity overtaking someone. In these cases, the person’s closest loved one may be the only one who notices telltale signs. So, the horror of the alien imposter narrative lies how in difficult it is to tell the difference between delusion and real metamorphosis.
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