The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was directed by Don Siegel in 1956. The plot is focused on a small town doctor named Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy). The story, along with the accompanying suspense, begins when the doctor goes back home to Santa Mira, CA, from a conference. While the doctor was gone most of the townspeople had come to believe that their family members were someone else. Since the doctor was gone, his normal patients went to see a psychiatrist who claimed they were experiencing hallucinations.
Dr. Bennell was concerned about his patients' well-being since most of his patients were experiencing these hallucination, but he became distracted by Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter). She had gone to the doctor in fear of her cousin's well being because the cousin too was experiencing hallucinations. The doctor clearly had a lot of patients to deal with since he had returned from his conference. However, at first he just considered them to be hallucinations.
The climax of the film came when Jack (King Donovan) and Theodora Belicec (Carolyn Jones) called the doctor while he was on date with Becky. The Belics were in a panic because they had a body with a blank face in their basement. After this scene the suspense of the movie was at its peak as the struggle to fend off the alien pods intensified.
These four main characters of the film showed an incredible talent for acting. The facial expressions and intense acting made the audience believe that they feared for their lives and the lives of others. Their fear was focused on the pods, who would absorb their identities but not their emotions and humanity so that their identical selves unleashed into their world with the purpose of killing off the human race. Although the characters had to fight to stay awake so that they would not be replaced by these alien pods, most of the people in Santa Mira, except for the doctor, succumbed to the dehumanizing and destructive pods. He manages to escape to warn other people of the danger of losing their humanity from these pods. The struggles to escape from the alien pods made the movie interesting and put the audience members on the edge of their seats seat.