How many movies does it take to tell the same story?

Four, if the story revolves around alien pods taking over the bodies of people in a small town until everyone is an emotionless automaton.

We're referring to The Invasion, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, which opens in Singapore this week.

It's the fourth time Hollywood has seen it fit to adapt Jack Finney's 1955 sci-fi novel, The Body Snatchers. The previous versions were released in 1956, 1978 and 1993.

Remakes are old news, of course. Audiences have seen their fair share over the past five years, from King Kong (2005) to this year's Best Picture Oscar winner, The Departed, based on the Hong Kong mole-versus-mole thriller, Infernal Affairs (2002).

Blame it on the kiasu mentality of studio executives who are wary of investing in untested material.

Which is why literary classics, such as Romeo and Juliet, Dracula and Frankenstein, have been remade dozens of times.

One online pundit even listed Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol as the source of more than 60 screen and made-for-TV adaptations.

More recently, Asian films, particularly horror flicks like Ju-On and The Ring, have been given the Hollywood spruce-up.

But what makes The Body Snatchers an anomaly in this remake cycle is that it's based on a novel that's only 50 years old.

In fact, it's such a pop culture landmark that no fewer than four parodies have hit the big screens. These include the corny The Invasion of the Girl Snatchers (1973) — about aliens abducting all the nubile young women on earth — to an adult anime called Invasion of Boobie Snatchers (2005). Heck, even the Looney Tunes got in on the act with a spoof, Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers (1992).

Clearly, The Body Snatchers has a storyline that lends itself particularly well to different interpretations.

"People have a fantasy to be free of daily cares," explained retired University of Illinois professor, Robert Carringer, in a recent online interview. "But what makes up our personalities but daily cares and daily interactions with others? This is the horror in Body Snatchers: That something might invade your personality and reduce it to nothingness."

Interestingly, that "something" has changed with the times. For instance, in the 1956 version, directed by Don Siegel, the theme had to do with how people with alleged Communist sympathies were ruthlessly hunted down by then-Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Director Philip Kaufman's take in 1978 was a cinematic swansong to flower power.

In 1993, director Abel Ferrara reinterpreted the story as a metaphor for the Aids epidemic, which had, by then, claimed high-profile celebs like actor Rock Hudson and Queen lead singer, Freddie Mercury.

In the same vein, the latest version, helmed by German auteur Oliver Hirschbiegel, reflects the zeitgeist of its times.

"You just have to look around our world today," said The Invasion screenwriter David Kajgenich, "to see that power inspires nothing more than the desire to retain it and to eliminate anything that threatens it". It's not a coincidence, he added, that the film is set in Washington DC.

Perhaps the time is ripe for a made-in-Singapore version of The Body Snatchers.

After all, there's been a lot of anxiety here in recent years over the influx of foreigners taking over our jobs.

Invasion of the Job Snatchers, anyone? - TODAY/fa