Today from 18:30-21.30 hrs, the UvA Film Club will host their next screening in HVL/BuzzHouse’s Co-Working Space! This week's film is Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Philip Kaufman, 1978), with an introduction by Prof. Abe Geil.

At once sci-fi horror and a neo-noir conspiracy film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers brought the idea of “pod people” into popular consciousness–an allegory that keeps on giving. This scenario of alien spores that would replace humanity by producing precise copies of every person on earth has itself proven a prolific duplication machine. It’s been remade and riffed upon countless times, from Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty (1998) to Pluribus. Kaufman’s remake of the 1956 original transplants the story from a small town setting to San Francisco of the late 1970s. In a blistering essay on San Francisco in the period, Rebecca Solnit declared Invasion of the Body Snatchers to be “1978’s definitive film.” Poised between the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s and the long counterrevolutions from the 1980s to the present, the film inhabits a period of what Antonio Gramsci called the interregnum. The most complex (and entertaining!) of all the versions, Kaufman’s film compels us to think a “time of monsters.”ubitsch’s directing and the undeniable chemistry between Melvyn Douglas and Greta Garbo.