The 1950’s were a time of fear and paranoia within the United States. During this time Cold War tensions were beginning to intensify giving way to the infamous Red Scare and the communist allegations of Joseph McCarthy. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the communal American fear of communist subversion reached its peak, colloquially known as the Red Scare. At this time, fewer than 50,000 out of the 150 million people, less than 1%, living in the United States belonged to the communist party, however the country remained in a state of panic. As a result of this hysteria, a senator named Joseph McCarthy began making accusations against alleged communist infiltration of government agencies. Therefore, the term McCarthyism, coined by political cartoonist Herbert Block, came to mean the movement to expose Communist subversives in the government and other important public institutions from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s. A …show more content…
This put the film up for interpretation as an allegory for Communism because at that time, people viewed communist people as cold and emotionless in order to uphold conformity in their behavior. This extreme conformity that is portrayed throughout Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an exaggeration of what Americans feared would become of the country, giving way to the red scare hysteria of the time. Although the director, Don Siegel, denied the movie having anti-communist motives he did give an explanation as to what he thought the pods represented,“ People are pods. Many of my associates are certainly pods. They have no feelings. They exist, breathe, sleep. To be a pod means that you have no passion, no anger, the spark has left you... It happens to leave you in a very dull world but that, by the way, is the world that most of us live in..... People are becoming vegetables. I don't know what the answer is except an awareness of it.” This explanation of pods is eerily similar to the common American’s view of a communist at that