Siegel's 1956 film version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers uses a number of realistic techniques like undistorted camera angles, and shots of mundane activities and locations to establish the rationality and logic of the daytime world of small-town California. As the movie begins to shift into the nightmarish world of the alien invasion, the shots become increasingly distorted, dark and gloomy, showing the slip into the subconscious, emotional existence. Here, the movie begins to adopt a moral stance, as we see that the main characters are truly at their most human as they live through the overt terror and emotion of the night time distortions of logic and reality. It is in the daytime world of logic that they can explain away the loss of their humanity to the aliens, but in the nighttime their humanity is revealed as the emotional, subconscious mess that defines them. As the...
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