Aliens are scary, especially when they don’t look like aliens. Well, technically I guess aliens that look like scary-looking aliens are the scariest looking aliens of all. But you know what I mean—secret aliens are scary because then anyone could be an alien. In fact, I could be an alien and writing this just to throw you off the scent with misinformation. Like, 'ha-ha, check out all this cool aliens-among-us fiction, I guess it must all be pretend.'

Yes, pretend.

Anyway... Invasion of the Body Snatchers is often imitated, never duplicated—that’s cause it was quadruplicated! (That’s a word, right?) The original 1956 flick used aliens as an allegory for Communism that riffed off McCarthy-era paranoia that Commies had infiltrated all levels of society. Except in the movie version, they were alien doppelgangers grown in pods rather than Russians grown in Siberia. But they were already here... AND COMING FOR YOU NEXT!

In the 1970s there was a hippie remake by Philip Kaufman (Henry and June, The Right Stuff that moved the small-town setting to the big city and starred Donald Sutherland who, in the movie's biggest plot twist, was not playing alien despite looking like one. That right there is what we call misdirection.

In 1993, Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara made a version that doesn't sound familiar to you because it’s not familiar to anyone. Seriously. It made, like, $400K in the theatres. The Screech sex tape made more than that.

Moving on... to the 2007 edition succinctly called The Invasion, which starred Nicole Kidman (who was once married to an actual secret alien named Tom Cruise... just kidding Scientology lawyers!) and badass James Bond. In this version, the alien nemesis is a virus so it can play on our fears of epidemics—and this was before swine flu, even—but don't worry, there are still pods.

Then there’s Invasion. Nope, that’s not a typo. This one is a TV show. An awesome, if super slow-paced TV show inspired by (but not beholden to) the Body Snatchers and starring William Fichtner who probably wasn’t an alien but does seem more like a young alien-esque Donald Sutherland than even Kiefer. It was set in Florida and the aliens arrived like Cubans during a hurricane and then hid in the Everglades and took over people’s bodies but still had their memories so it was hard to tell they but Fichtner totally knew something was up. And we almost found out, too, except just at it got good, it got cancelled.

More recently, there's V, which is way heavy on the sleeper-agent alien storyline—though without the Cold War context, it lacks some oomph. It’s not bad, but can’t compare to the original miniseries, in which the aliens actually revealed themselves to us rather than taking over our bodies. But underneath their human skin they were actually rodent-quaffing lizards. Also, N.azis.

So I hope we’ve all learned a valuable lesson here—which is that in the (fictional) secret-alien genre, there are an awful lot of clones. Hmmm...

Catch The Invasion (2007) this Saturday at 4pm & 10pm ET/PT on Showcase.