By then, though, the local police and telephone lines are compromised, and for all they know, they’re the only four humans left in town. Watching a pod person be shucked is unsettling, as is seeing the townsfolk assemble to spread the contagion and hunt our heroes as one. Director Don Siegel, for his part, only said that a pod person is anyone stumbling through their days with “no passion.” “People are becoming vegetables,” he warned. The 1956 Body Snatchers may not be the best version of the story, but it is the rawest in insisting that something has gone wrong with society. Appropriately enough, the fact that we all respond to Invasion of the Body Snatchers differently is a triumph of the individualism it believes in.