Ranking Every Invasion Of The Body Snatchers Ending From Worst To Best

There are several different versions of the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers ending, based on each retelling in various films. The Body Snatchers is a short but chilling Jack Finney novel about alien pods that arrive on Earth and can replicate and replace captured human hosts. However, these doppelgangers lack empathy and emotion. This concept has proven elastic, with the book being adapted four times and inspiring countless other novels, movies, and shows.

Don Siegel directed the first Invasion Of The Body Snatchers in 1956, which used the concept as a metaphor for the Red Scare. Philip Kaufman remade it in 1978, with this take being the most acclaimed. Body Snatchers (1993) moved the action to an isolated military base, with director Abel Ferrara working from a screenplay co-written by Stuart Gordon. The most recent was 2007’s The Invasion, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. The original novel ended surprisingly upbeat, but how do the different iterations of the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers endings stack up?

4 The Invasion (2007)

Dr. Bennett Finds A Cure

For The Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies, the 2007 release The Invasion is considered the worst of the bunch. The movie was a critical flop, sitting at 20% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes. It was also a box office bomb, making only $40 million on a $65 million budget (via Box Office Mojo).

The biggest problem is that it turned the frightening horror story into a big-budget action movie. In the film, Nicole Kidman stars as Dr. Carol Bennett, a psychiatrist who works with another doctor friend (Daniel Craig), when she believes people have begun to change.

The big difference in this movie’s ending is that Dr. Bennett finds a cure to stop the alien invasion. However, the twist is that the invaders promised peace, and when humanity found its care, people returned to their violent ways. It had a happy ending that ultimately turned out bad. The movie had good social commentary, but it wasn’t enough to save it from its big-budget trappings.

3 Body Snatchers (1993)

The Aliens Claim They Have Already Infected The World

Director

Abel Ferrara

Release Date

February 18, 1994

Writers

Jack Finney , Raymond Cistheri , Larry Cohen , Stuart Gordon , Dennis Paoli , Nicholas St. John

Cast

Gabrielle Anwar , Meg Tilly , Terry Kinney , Reilly Murphy , Billy Wirth , Christine Elise , R. Lee Ermey , Kathleen Doyle

The least known of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies came in 1993 from director Abel Ferrera. Based on a script co-written by Stuart Gordon, the story moves the action to a military base in Alabama, where the people working there are replaced by the duplicates grown in plantlike pods. Like the other entries in the series, they are exact duplicates of the people they replace, except for a lack of emotion.

Body Snatchers’ ending follows two survivors in an attack helicopter fighting to destroy the pod people as they try to leave to infect the world. However, the movie has a grim ending where the survivors land at another base and one of their replaced friends says there’s nowhere to go and there’s no one like them left. The insinuation is that the aliens have already infected the rest of the world. The biggest problem with this ending is that they only hear the news, which lacks the visceral punch of the previous movies.

2 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Running Through The Streets Yelling For Help

Director

Don Siegel

Release Date

February 5, 1956

Writers

Daniel Mainwaring , Jack Finney , Richard Collins

Cast

kevin mccarthy , Dana Wynter , Larry Gates , King Donovan , Carolyn Jones , Jean Willes , Ralphe Dumke , Virginia Christine

Runtime

80 Minutes

The first Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie, directed by Don Siegel, arrived in 1956. The movie — shot in black and white — stars Kevin McCarthy as a man named Miles Bennett, held in a Los Angeles hospital where he claims aliens have begun to replace his neighbors. These scenes frame the movie as the story plays out to show the panic in town as the alien imposters start to take over.

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers ending is a classic, as Miles realizes his girlfriend Becky has become one of the aliens and sounds an alarm to try to capture him. The scene of Miles running down the street screaming for help remains notable, and Philip Kaufman reinvented it for the 1978 remake, where McCarthy had a cameo. However, the ending of this first movie was more optimistic than the rest, as the doctors and police believed him and set out to stop the aliens.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers also had an alternate ending that wasn’t so optimistic, as it originally ended with Bennett running down the road screaming as truckloads of the pods passed him on the streets, and no one believed him or stopped to help. Both endings worked, and this movie – an allegory for the Red Scare – remains a beloved sci-fi classic.

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1 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

The Final Scream

Director

Philip Kaufman

Release Date

December 22, 1978

Studio(s)

United Artists

Writers

W.D. Richter

Runtime

115 minutes

Budget

$3.5 million

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The 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the most surprising horror remakes of all time. Not only was the movie considered better than the original, but it was also a made-for-TV film that was actually better than most theatrical releases at the time. Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, and Leonard Nimoy starred in the film as survivors trying to escape the alien invasion in which pod people replaced humanity.

What made this Invasion of the Body Snatchers ending better than the rest was the moment when survivor Elizabeth Driscoll realized that she had lost all of her allies, and hope seemed bleak. The minute she saw Matthew on the university campus and called out his name, only for him to emit an alien high-pitched scream, the movie solidifies its ending as one of the most chilling and frightening in horror movie history.