Abel Ferrara’s sci-fi horror Body Snatchers was largely overlooked in 1993, but it’s aged remarkably well in the decades since.

Movie-goers and film scholars have argued for decades over which side of the political divide director Don Siegel and his collaborators fell on when they made Invasion Of The Body Snatchers at the height of the Cold War in 1956. Did it tap into contemporary fears of an insidious communist takeover, or was it a Crucible-like jab at McCarthyist witch hunts?

Siegel always maintained that he didn’t have politics in mind when he made the film, adapted from author Jack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers; he simply intended it to be an entertaining, disturbing thrill ride. And what a thrill-ride it is: starring Kevin McCarthy as a small-town doctor who’s slow to realise his patients – and gradually the entire town – is being replaced by soulless pod people – it’s a tense,...