Abel Ferrara Only Went Hollywood Once, but It Resulted in a Horror Classic

In the early 1990s, director Abel Ferrara was coming off of a major artistic, if not commercial, triumph, “King of New York,” when he got a surprising call from his agent. Warner Bros. had an offer: they wanted Ferrara to direct the third incarnation of Jack Finney’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The idea was intriguing; could one of cinema’s most idiosyncratic and provocative auteurs apply his skill set to a mainstream genre project without either Ferrara or Hollywood losing anything in the process?

The answer turned out to be both yes and no. The movie that emerged from Ferrara’s sole collaboration with the Hollywood industrial machine, 1993’s “The Body Snatchers,” is a Ferrara classic through-and-through, infused with the director’s moral preoccupations and elevated by his command of his craft. It’s completely uncompromising — at one point a child is tossed out of a helicopter, and it’s intended to be a happy moment — but it also completely delivers the goods as a studio horror film, with invigorating spectacle, swift pacing, and enough genuinely scary moments to propel three or four “Conjuring” movies.

Like Martin Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” or Spike Lee’s “Inside Man,” “Body Snatchers” threads the needle between auteurist expression and mainstream escapism, working equally well on both levels in a way that feels almost miraculous. It should have been a huge hit, and probably would have been if Warner Bros. had bothered to put any kind of effort into releasing it. By the time Warners dumped it into theaters, however, too many bad feelings had accumulated between the executives and Ferrara for anyone to have much incentive to make the picture a success.

Like the previous two versions of the story, Don Siegel’s 1956 adaptation and the 1978 remake by Philip Kaufman (both titled “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”), “Body Snatchers” is based on Jack Finney’s unsettling 1955 novel “The Body Snatchers.” (A fourth version, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, would follow Ferrara’s in 2007 — that one was simply titled “Invasion.”) In all the iterations of the story the premise is the same: an alien invasion has created a world where people are being replaced by emotionless doubles that look and sound exactly like the originals they’re copying — making it difficult to tell if the people around you are the ones you know and love or imposter “pod people.”

Finney’s story proved extremely durable and adaptable over the years; all four cinematic adaptations are, to varying degrees, quite good. That’s in spite of harmful studio interference — for whatever reason (the bleakness of Finney’s premise?), three of the four “Body Snatchers” movies were plagued by clashes between the filmmakers and their financiers. In Siegel’s case, the distributor imposed a corny framing story designed to give the audience a completely unearned sense of hope at the end; for the 2007 version, Warner Bros. spent millions to have the Wachowskis and James McTeigue rework and reshoot much of director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s footage, adding action sequences and, again, changing the ending.

According to Ferrara’s excellent memoir, “Scene,” the process of making “Body Snatchers” consisted of an endless series of arguments between him and Warner Bros. over everything from the visual style to the final shape of the film; he hilariously recounts the absurdities of the studio’s many “suggestions” and the test screenings that nearly ruined the film (“No bullshit, almost every film coming out of Hollywood is recut around notes given by sixteen-year-olds”). Unlike Siegel and Hirschbiegel, Ferrara seems to have won his most important battles, but it came at a cost.

Seemingly out of spite, Warner Bros. dumped the movie, letting it trickle out onto a handful of screens with zero publicity even though it had received rave reviews at Cannes. (Although he shot “The Bad Lieutenant” after “Body Snatchers,” there were so many delays with the latter film that “Bad Lieutenant” came out first.) Frustrated by the battles, Ferrara never made another major studio film — which he might see as a positive, but based on the evidence of “The Body Snatchers,” it was clearly a loss for the rest of us.

‘Body Snatchers’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

That’s because “Body Snatchers,” while not necessarily Ferrara’s best film, gives him the resources to display the breadth of his talent in a way that he never had before and never would again. Depending on which budget estimate you believe, “Body Snatchers” gave Ferrara somewhere around a dozen times the money he had on “Bad Lieutenant” and most of his other films, and every dollar is on screen. One wouldn’t typically make comparisons between Steven Spielberg and a director who got his start with a porno movie called “Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy,” but “Body Snatchers” is positively Spielbergian in its mastery of blocking, composition, and camera movement.

Ferrara and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli are on fire in this film, creating astonishingly elaborate set-ups in which the camera and actors dance in a kind of elegantly choreographed ballet; while Ferrara always had a strong sense of visuals going back to his breakthrough hit “Ms. 45,” on most of his movies he was too busy running and gunning to craft the kinds of shots we get here, where the camera starts on one character, picks up another, weaves over to another plane of action, and ultimately combines so many things in one image — and then creates such meaning between images through Anthony Redman’s thoughtful editing — that “Body Snatchers” crams more emotion and information into its 87 minutes than some movies twice its length.

A great deal of the movie’s power derives from its subtle — and some not-so-subtle — variations on the Finney novel and subsequent films. In the book and other movies, there’s a slow build; it takes a while for there to be a significantly large number of pod people outnumbering the humans, and even longer for the hero to discover that someone important in his own life is not who they seem. Ferrara’s film hits the ground running; the story takes place on a military base where the infection has already become widespread, and a major character — in this case a mom (Meg Tilly), not a lover — turns alien early on in an extremely disturbing set piece.

‘Body Snatchers’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Ferrara didn’t like the military base location, which was a mandate that came down from the studio. (He and his usual screenwriting collaborator, Nicholas St. John, were allowed to jettison most of what had been written before they came on board and start from scratch, but they were forced to keep the military setting.) This is one instance (maybe the only one) where the studio was right, however — the military base is both what distinguishes the film from the other movie versions, and the source of additional tension that didn’t exist in those movies.

There’s an added layer of terror in “Body Snatchers” that none of the other adaptations have, because there’s almost zero possibility of escape right from the beginning. In the earlier movies, there’s a sense, at least initially, that governmental institutions might be able to come in and save the day — here, there’s no saving the day, because the institutions are already infected; the people you would come to for help are the ones trying to kill you. The military setting also gets a lot of creepy mileage out of the fact that conformity is baked into the profession — how can you tell a pod person from a human in a job where the humans are all supposed to suppress any hint of individuality and independence?

In spite of his protests about the milieu, Ferrara has a lot of fun with it, ultimately turning “Body Snatchers” into a kind of meta-commentary on working in the studio system. The funniest instance of this kind of self-reflexivity comes in a classroom scene where a kid watches as all of his peers are celebrated for painting the exact same picture while his exhibits his own artistic personality — and thus gives him away as a human. The kid might as well be Ferrara, trying to give Warner Bros. something special while they try to sand off its edges and flatten its peaks.

Yet the irony is that for as forceful as “Body Snatchers” is — and it is just as intense and feverish as any of Ferrara’s best work — its director’s aims match perfectly with the goals of an audience-pleasing horror film, since horror is the mainstream genre most friendly to subversive ideas and uncomfortable emotional responses. Ferrara isn’t getting away with anything sneaky in “Body Snatchers,” he’s giving the studio exactly what they should want — if only it hadn’t been too stupid to recognize it.

On Vinegar Syndrome’s excellent new 4K UHD release of the film, there’s an interview with Ferrara in which he notes that he had done this kind of thing before, albeit on a smaller scale — the porno flick “Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy” and the exploitation masterpiece “Ms. 45” were both cases in which Ferrara showed that he knew how to satisfy commercial expectations while also honoring his own muse. It’s easy to imagine a world in which Ferrara made many more studio pictures, not just horror movies but crime films, maybe erotic thrillers — movies where his edgy inclinations would have provided an economic benefit to his corporate overlords.

That he didn’t isn’t any great tragedy — after “Body Snatchers” Ferrara made as many excellent films as just about anybody, from “Dangerous Game” and “The Funeral” to “New Rose Hotel” and “4:44 Last Day on Earth” — but given how skillfully and dazzlingly he maximized Hollywood’s resources the one time he was given access to them, it would have been nice to see him try a few more films on that scale. Then again, maybe “Body Snatchers” is enough — its pleasures are so numerous and specific to its creator that the movie provides more rewards in a 10th viewing than most films can on their first.

“Body Snatchers” is currently available in a highly recommended 4K UHD edition from Vinegar Syndrome, and streaming on The Criterion Channel as part of its “Directed by Abel Ferrara” series.