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Ellsworth Fredericks, ASC was assigned to photograph Body Snatchers. He had started as assistant cameraman to John Seitz, ASC in 1927, and was dividing his time between making TV dramas for MCA and features at Allied Artists, for whom he photographed 13 pictures in four years.
Art director Ted Haworth, who had designed Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and I Confess, began busily scouting locations on the first week of January, 1955. To represent the fictitious Santa Mira, he first considered Mill Valley (located to the north of San Francisco) which had been Finney's model for the doomed town. He and Siegel decided on Sierra Madre, a beautiful, hill-laden San Gabriel Valley town just north of Pasadena. Principal photography commenced on March 23, with five days of exteriors in Sierra Madre. A few other location shots were captured in the Los Angeles area, after which interiors were shot at the studio. On April 7, the film's long climactic chase, which had begun in Sierra Madre, was continued on Mulholland Drive - a thoroughfare which snakes over the Santa Monica Mountains from Hollywood to the Pacific - and in the granite crags and caves of Brush Quarry in Bronson Canyon, a part of the parks administration in Hollywood.
Brush Quarry - as it had in hundreds of serials, Westerns and horror films - provided ominous shapes that added to the film's suspense and terror. Cold fear mounts after the couple takes refuge in the dark mine tunnel. Lying in a muddy depression under some boards, they listen to the approach of the pod people and glimpse their running feet and flashlight beams through the spaces between the boards. The sound effects are as harrowing as the visuals.
The climactic night scenes of Miles' hysterical attempts to stop traffic on the freeway were actually filmed before dawn on a little crossing bridge, utilizing about 50 vehicles driven by professional stunt drivers. Although McCarthy teetered dangerously close to fatigue, the actor performed the hazardous sequence without a double.
Before even a frame of film had been shot, the filmmakers decided to minimize the use of special effects, avoiding process screens and opticals in favor of both realism and economy. The only exceptions to the rule were full-scale seed pods and embryo bodies, which cost about $30,000 overall. Ted Hayworth designed ten rubber pods for the transformation scenes, while many non-functioning ones were crafted from plastic.
It was also necessary to make latex replicas of the nude bodies of McCarthy, Wynter, Jones and Donovan to be revealed (but also tastefully concealed) in a welter of froth and bubbles when the pods burst open. After a studio executive called Siegel to his office and informed him that nudity would never besmirch an Allied Artists picture, the director had the body casts made in secret. Siegel openly quipped that the executive himself had become a pod.
Milt Rice described the making of the pods when the effects were submitted for Academy Award consideration: "The construction began with the sculpturing of full-sized clay models. From these models, casts were made and form molds taken. Liquid latex was used to make the 'skins' of the pods, and these skins were, in turn, mounted on mechanized frames. In addition, life-sized replicas of the four principals and 'embryo blanks' were also constructed in the above manner.
"During actual operation, hydraulics were used to manipulate the action of the pods," he added. "Compressed air and chemicals were employed to cause the pods to pulsate and emit frothy substances, as well as [to force] the embryos from the pods. Substitution of life-sized replicas of principals was handled manually."
The "birth" scenes were overcranked so that the bubbles appeared to burst ponderously; the footage was then printed in reverse so that the bubbles seemed to be flattening onto the skins of the embryos. The "unfinished" blank look of the pale embryos is not gruesome, but subtly horrifying.
The picture's principal shoot wrapped on April 18, after 10 days of rehearsal and 19 days of photography. Postproduction would prove to be much more time-consuming. For a month, Siegel toiled with the studio editorial supervisor, Richard Heermance, to create a rough cut. Studio chiefs already had demanded the deletion of several humor-tinged scenes that Siegel and Mainwaring believed to be vital to the story's overall realism. Wanger complained in general about the "sharp, so-called 'B' cutting." He also had McCarthy, who was then in New York, record the opening narration from Finney's book and dub some dialogue.
Fredericks' photographic touches greatly enhance the story. The early town scenes, presented with long takes, bright daylight and eye-level camera angles reminiscent of the Blondie and Hardy Family series films, evoke realistic normality. Miles is sometimes shown from a slight low angle to emphasize his strength and dependability. When the pods are discovered, the filmmakers employ a few "Dutch angles" and sharp tilts. As the nefarious alien plot is revealed, the shadows become darker and viewers are treated to some deep-focus shots in the best Citizen Kane tradition. This tactic is particularly chilling when the pods are shown with the humans they will replace; in one shot, Jack's pod double awakens on a pool table in the foreground as Jack sleeps at a bar behind it. The climactic high-contrast scenes of flashlights and hulking silhouettes in the dark cave, including pit-shots of the pod-people thundering over the lovers' hiding place, could hardly be better.
Wanger was horrified to learn that the Allied execs opted to release the picture in SuperScope, an anamorphic widescreen process introduced by RKO Radio in 1954. It differed from CinemaScope in that the photography was done with normal lenses; the images were squeezed at the printing stage rather than in the camera. Wanger argued that a duped image would not do justice to Dana Wynter's beauty, that the carefully wrought compositions would be ruined, and that the widescreen effect would make the picture resemble recent inferior anamorphic sci-fi pictures Again, he was overruled - widescreen was considered a "must" at the time due to the perceived competition with television for audiences. Incidentally, Wanger was dead right on all counts.
The damage caused by this last-minute decision can hardly be exaggerated. Fredericks had composed the picture for the 1.33:1 ratio, and the image-chopping required to obtain the 2:1 ratio needed for SuperScope not only destroyed the compositions, but left important details out of the frame. In addition, the images became grainier when the remaining frame was blown up to fill the wide screens. Only a very good movie could survive such butchery; somehow, Body Snatchers did.
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