‘Type H’: Medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the Body Snatchers films

Psychoanalysis is one of several sociomedical discourses that work to defamiliarize human subjective identity in three film adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman, 1978) and Body Snatchers (Ferrara, 1993). In each film a subdominant narrative about human mental aberration overlaps with, and complements, the more overt narrative about alien replication of seemingly unique individual identity, the total effect being to render ‘Type H’ (the aliens’ shorthand term for the human species in the 1978 film) as a pathological type, self-divided, deranged, heterogeneous and phantasmatic.