ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I watched The Brain Eaters (1957), a janky B-movie about mind-hijacking (and weirdly fuzzy) slugs invading a little town. Befitting its title, The Brain Eaters has a bombastic and clumsy style with frequent comedic moments that would be skillful if they were intentional. This and the way it resolves all of its mysteries immediately upon posing them, while leaving many questions it hasn’t thought to ask eternally hanging, make it an entertaining watch, at least. The most notable thing about it is that Robert Heinlein successfully sued the filmmakers for plagiarizing the plot of his 1951 novel The Puppet Masters, which is the most seminal early exploration of the mind-control parasites trope. All of the flashes of creepy paranoia the film manages to achieve, by revealing ostensibly trustworthy characters to in fact have had throbbing neck slugs steering them, are lifted straight from Heinlein’s novel.
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