Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

You don't necessarily need to invade another planet with fleets of flying saucers raining death down on the population and reducing their cities to flaming rubble.  Sometimes all you need is to be an alien capable of assimilating all the characteristics of some hapless human and then disposing of the original.  That way you not only can conquer the Earth, but also be a metaphor for fanatical Communist infiltration... Or is it McCarthyite conformist paranoia?  I forget which.

It's rumoured that a few years ago aliens tried this very ploy to invade the Earth, but their attempt to replace Earthlings with soulless automatons without inner lives was foiled when they chose Minnesota as their primary target and the aliens got confused when they couldn't tell their replicas from the originals.

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