The horror genre
The horror genre is one of the most popular genres and we may say that it has started to develop practically immediately with the development of show business and a free access of wide audience to cinemas and television. We can find a lot of causes of the popularity of this genre but it is still not so easy to explain its phenomenon, namely why it is so attractive for people despite all its unreality. However, it would be a great mistake to say that horror movies are plain or even primitive. Naturally, there are some movies which are really so stereotyped, unbearably plain, and absolutely thoughtless.
But in my opinion, it is simply exclusion or films that were created by specialists who are far from real moviemaking and they can create nothing but films of low quality regardless its genre. Also I would say that as any other branch of art cinema has its genius and its mediocre majority because good films may be created only by a good crew and the genre is not so important. Among such genius of cinema I would name the crews that worked on two films of horror genre, they are “Invasion of Body Snatchers” and “The Thing”.
I said crews not because I do not want to agree with those who believe that Donald Siegel and John Carpenter were outstanding directors, on the contrary I am glad that people who worked on these two films were led by such well-qualified professionals. So, we may say that “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Thing” are classics of the horror genre and the best ones. But what I would like to analyze is the reason why they are treated as such and in which way they are similar or different.
First of all, it is necessary to say that these two films were created at different time. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was created in the middle 1950s, more precisely in 1956 whereas “The Thing” was created in 1982. It seems that such time difference should make the films completely different but, strangely enough, they have a lot of common aspects. That is why at the beginning I would like to dwell upon similarities of both films. First of all, we may say that, to a certain extent, the theme is close.
Both films focus on the problem of the invasion of human or just alive bodies by some aliens that tends to control the personality, the hosts actions judgments, etc. In the case of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, we deal with creatures that “has to wait for the perfect moment when the target is asleep), and spend the next few hours consuming and taking on that form. If the host wake up when the process is not complete, the whole procedure is a failure” (LeGacy 1978:288). On the other hand, the thing needs just a few minutes to do it because “it can assimilate the host while its still conscious, against the host's will” (Landon 1993:39). Probably such changes are caused by the changes of time or epoch. It is obvious that the rhythm of life in 1980s was much faster than in 1950s, certainly it found its expression in the perception of the idea of possible alien assault or attempts to invade human minds.
By the way, I think that both films express the trend that took place in the society when the idea of total control of a human mind became more and more widely spread. It means that symbolically by aliens creators of the films tried to imply those powers either political or economical that by different means aimed at the total control of public conscious through the invasion of the mind of a separate individual. It was quite actual if we take into account if we take into consideration the time when both films were released, 1952 it was the year of the beginning of the cold war when the tension between the well-developed democratic world and the communistic Soviet Union grew and the governments of many countries, including the most democratic, had started to struggle for the control of public opinion and even each particular individual.
At the same time, 1982 it was a period when the cold war achieved its apogee and the world was on the eve of the Reagan's declaration of the war on the ‘empire of evil' when the situation was very resembling to that of early 1950s. Furthermore, the degree of surveillance grew and specialists began to spoke about the total control of certain organizations over people. In such a situation the people transformed in pods in the horror films I've just named look like a prophecy and warning against such dangerous practice.
