Critical Reception and Legacy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The film opened at Christmas and outgrossed its budget seven times over

Metric	Amount
Budget	~$3.5 million
Domestic gross	~$24.9 million
Wide release	December 22, 1978 (445 screens)

The film was a solid commercial hit. United Artists opened it the week before Christmas against a thin field and it held for months. (wikipedia, imdb)

Kael's review was the loudest on release and set the terms

Pauline Kael's New Yorker notice treated the remake as a better film than the 1956 original and put it in company with the genre entertainments she was championing that decade:

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers is more sheer fun than any movie I've seen since Carrie and Jaws and maybe parts of The Spy Who Loved Me." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1978)

"It may be the best film of its kind ever made." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1978)

Kael's reading was local and specific: she heard est seminars, group therapy, and the whole California human-potential industry in Kibner's bedside manner, and she called Werner Erhard "the original spore" in the piece. (deepfocusreview)

Ebert dissented and kept dissenting

Roger Ebert was skeptical of both the film and Kael's enthusiasm, reading the Watergate and pod-conformity talk as overheated and finding Kael's praise "inexplicable." Gene Siskel split the difference on Sneak Previews and gave it three stars:

"One of the more entertaining films in what has turned out to be a dismal Christmas movie season." — Gene Siskel, Sneak Previews (1978) (broadcast, not available online)

The Ebert/Kael disagreement became part of the film's reception history — a case where the minority position at release eventually became a minority position at every subsequent reassessment.

Regional critics caught the tone that mattered

Newspaper critics outside New York recognized the film's specific achievement in horror — that the fear is built out of plausible human behavior, not creature effects:

"The horror is a deeply felt, brilliantly imagined and visualized horror, not just a matter of special effects." — Richard Freedman, Newark Star-Ledger (1978)

"A relentless pessimism pervades the action, and it is chillingly absorbing." — George Anderson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1978)

Variety, reviewing the film as a trade matter, reached for a framing that has since become the standard line about the picture:

"Validates the entire concept of remakes." — Variety (1978)

The film settled into the canon of remakes that surpass their originals

The aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes now sits at 93% with the critical consensus calling it "a powerful remake that expands upon themes and ideas only lightly explored in the original." (rottentomatoes)

It appears on most "best horror remakes" lists and most "best films of 1978" lists, and is routinely named alongside Carpenter's The Thing and Cronenberg's The Fly as one of the three horror remakes that justified their existence. The claim that Philip Kaufman's (in Body Snatchers, as director) version is better than Don Siegel's (in Body Snatchers, as director) 1956 original is no longer controversial — it's the default position in modern genre writing. See The 1956 Original and Remakes That Surpass Their Originals.

The final scream is the shot that carried the film into the canon

The ending — Donald Sutherland (in Body Snatchers, as actor) turning on Veronica Cartwright (in Body Snatchers, as actor), the pointing arm, the open mouth — is one of the most cited moments in horror. It works because the rest of the film has earned it, and because it reverses what a horror ending is supposed to do:

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the horror story that keeps on giving — or taking." — Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com (2014)

Discussion of the shot occupies its own page. See The Ending (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and The Pod Scream.

The franchise kept going and kept diminishing

Two further adaptations of the Jack Finney novel followed. Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers (1993) moved the story to a Southern military base and was generally well received as a lean, angry variant on the material. Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion (2007), starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, was taken out of Hirschbiegel's hands in post-production, reshot by the Wachowskis and James McTeigue, and released to poor reviews and a worse box office. Roger Ebert gave the 1993 film a strong notice and found the 2007 version largely inert. (rogerebert body snatchers 1993, rogerebert the invasion 2007)

Neither film displaced Kaufman's version in the public memory. When the phrase "Body Snatchers" comes up in film writing, the 1978 film is what it refers to.