They're here already - you're next...

I have to write a paper for one of my classes, the purpose for which is to take a film from before 1965 and analyze its extra-textual elements. So I decided to go with the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a low-budget but historically significant film that was made in 1956. 1956...if you remember what era the U.S. was in at this time, you wouldn't find it too surprising to discover that this film evoked the McCarthyism of Cold War America.

The film is about a city where alien vegetable pods land and possess human bodies, so that these bodies look like us and act like us, making it difficult or impossible to tell who is normal, who can be trusted. During the 1940's and 1950's, the double agent/mole concept was very prevalent, as Americans held this consistent fear and paranoia that there were Communist spies among them--and like the vegetable pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Americans likewise believed that Communist spies were difficult to identify...and so people began to think they could not trust anyone.

I've placed the trailer for the movie below--and if you notice it to be quite cheesy, remember this was the style of the 1950's...the last line in this clip, "They're here already - you're next" reflects the mentality of this time that it was widely believed that the Communists aspired to spread their ideology (in the form of propaganda and espionage) throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world...what's interesting is that this film itself could be argued as a form of propaganda.