Them! (1954)
- Andrew Smith
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
"A horror horde of crawl-and-crush giants clawing out of the earth from mile-deep catacombs!"
Plot
Atomic testing in New Mexico causes normal ants to mutate into giant man-eating monsters. Tracking the queens, a team of scientists discover that the ants are making nests inside the 700 miles of storm sewer tunnels beneath Los Angeles. It’s a race against time to destroy them before they can multiply.
Review
When you are just standing in your kitchen and you see a single tiny ant marching across the counter, your first instinct isn't usually sheer terror. It's annoyance, mostly. You just grab a paper towel, wipe it away, and go back to making your coffee. It's a completely mundane, almost invisible part of your daily life, but what if you flipped that scale? What if you walked into your kitchen and that ant was the size of a city bus and suddenly you are the crumb on the counter? It’s a genuinely horrifying image in which a classic sci-fi film from 1954 answered - Them! But the poster, featuring a giant mutated ant holding a screaming woman, looks incredibly cheesy and ridiculous. It sounds like the literal definition of cheap late-night drive-in fodder. But this seemingly ludicrous movie, about giant, man-eating mutant ants, became a thought-provoking, cinematic masterpiece, and arguably the undisputed pinnacle of a long-lost movie genre.
The early 1950s sci-fi genre was a very specific era of cinematic anxiety where the movie world had barely survived a massive on-screen reptilian onslaught. In 1953, audiences were hit with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. But it was huge - a dinosaur awakened by an atomic bomb. Then literally just one year later, in 1954, the undisputed king arrives - Godzilla. Once again, atomic testing wakes up a prehistoric, godlike leviathan. Thus, you had the simple and established formula - big, stompy reptiles destroying major metropolitan cities. And then Them! arrives. It does something completely unprecedented by pivoting the camera away from those ancient mythological dinosaurs and points it directly at the bugs in our own back gardens. It becomes the very first atomic monster movie to feature mutated insects as the primary threat.
The core premise is that atomic testing in the New Mexico desert mutates normal ants into giant, man-eating monsters. As the ants wreak havoc across the state, elite scientists are on a desperate hunt for the Queen. With such a simple premise, Them! planted the roots for an entire sub-genre. It paved the way for lesser copycats like The Deadly Mantis and Tarantula, not to mention a slew of locusts, scorpions, and a giant antimatter space buzzard from The Giant Claw, which is quite the conceptual escalation from a humble desert ant. Why did the jump from giant dinosaurs like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms or lizards like Godzilla to normal insects capture the genre's imagination so fiercely? I mean a lizard makes sense, but an ant? It taps into the very real, very grounded fear of atomic energy in the 1950s. The atomic bomb wasn’t just the fear of a big explosion like a conventional bomb but the manipulation and ultimate annihilation of bodily atoms, something you literally cannot even see that results in apocalyptic destruction. It was incomprehensible power in the smallest package. Now take something small and mundane like a literal ant in the desert and you weaponize it. Godzilla is a force of nature. He's a hurricane and you can't fight a hurricane. But an ant? An ant is an infestation. Think about the last time you found ants in your house or your garden. It's this invasive violation of your space. When you make that infestation ten feet tall, it taps into a much more intimate crawling paranoia. The threat isn't coming from the sky; it’s already in the dirt beneath your feet. The atomic age is mutating your own backyard.
However, a great premise doesn't guarantee a great movie, The film's success actually hinges on a brilliant directorial choice, and it's so counterintuitive. The director, Gordon Douglas, decides not to show the monsters right away. The restraint is incredible for this time period. He creates this incredibly suspenseful, dialogue-heavy first half that is built entirely on clues. No creature reveals, just the terrifying evidence left behind. And the evidence is handled like a grim police procedural. You've got a traumatized little girl wandering the desert, you have a mysteriously destroyed local store completely ripped apart, giant footprints in the sand, and a state trooper who goes missing entirely off-screen. There's the audio signature. Instead of visuals, the ants' presence is announced by this eerie, high-pitched shrieking noise, which completely replaces the visual monster for the first half of the film. I really want to push back on modern cinema tropes here though, because today, movies rely so heavily on instant visual gratification. The CGI monster is usually right in your face in the first five minutes. Everything is over explained and over shown. Holding back the visual and substituting it with that high-pitched shrieking is like a lost art of tension building? Spielberg did it in Jaws with the shark and John Williams’ signature motif. It works so well because the human mind fills in the blanks - Gestalt psychology. By providing credible evidence of a serious threat without actually showing it, the director forces the audience to imagine an unspeakable horror. What’s pictured in your head is always going to be scarier than what they can build. A 1950s prop department has physical limitations. But the monster your imagination builds when you're sitting in a dark theatre listening to that high-pitched shrieking has no limitations. It's perfectly tailored by your own subconscious to terrify you.
But the suspense generated by not seeing the ants only works if we genuinely care about the humans trying to survive them right now. If the characters are boring, the audience just checks out, which happened in a lot of those copycat B-movies from the 50s filled with square-jawed American military types and one-note damsels in distress. But here, the cast is phenomenal. James Whitmore and James Arness are incredibly likeable leads, but the guy who steals the show is Edmund Gwenn as the elderly scientist. He is so good at delivering these serious downbeat lines with all the scientific jargon, but he brilliantly doubles as minor comic relief. The humour is such a smart addition to his character. He's bossing these younger military men around during action sequences but totally dodging any physical exertion himself because he's this doddery older guy. Then there's Joan Weldon who plays the young, brilliant scientist. This genuinely surprised me because the film refreshingly ignores any soppy romantic subplot. For a 1950s sci-fi B-movie to prioritize a female character's intellect over a forced romance, it feels incredibly modern. She gets to portray genuine intelligence and self-control. This connects directly to the film's overall high quality. A first-rate script doesn't just treat the threat seriously; it treats the characters seriously. By giving them professional competence and humour, you anchor the absurdity. If she was just a damsel in distress, swooning over the military guys, the audience would subconsciously write the movie off as a cartoon. If you take the character seriously so you take the giant ants seriously.
Eventually all the talk and the jargon and the off-screen tension it has to pay off and you must to showcase the real stars of the film. The giant mechanical creations were massive, physically built props. And while they might look a little clunky to us today, their physical presence on set caused a real stir. The actors had to genuinely fend off massive fiberglass mandibles and mechanical claws, giving them all a real workout whilst shooting scenes! The panic you see is at least partially real because they are wrestling a giant machine. Douglas was smart about it, cleverly masking the props physical failings. He knew the seams would show in broad daylight, so he battered the camera with sandstorms or hid the creatures in darkness, using that as misdirection so the audience only sees what he wants them to see. He never lets you stare too long at the prop monsters.
This masterful use of shadows culminates in the film's barnstorming climax in the storm sewers. It’s a dark, ominous struggle for survival in the cramped, labyrinthian storm sewers of Los Angeles. It's fascinating because other genre films of the time gleefully destroyed famous above ground landmarks. Like Godzilla smashing Tokyo or the Rhedosaurus from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms tearing up New York. Here, Them! proved that an out-of-sight underground battle could be just as spectacular. The historical legacy of this specific choice is monumental because this entire sewer sequence is the literal prototype for countless modern classic films. Think about the structure. You have a heavily armed group of professionals moving slowly through a dark, industrial maze-like environment. They're using tracking devices. They're hunting a mutated threat that could be hiding around any corner or dropping from the ceiling. The writers essentially drafted the blueprint for the monster in a maze trope where characters hunt monsters in dark, labyrinthian settings. Think Alien, Aliens, hell even the Velociraptors in the Visitor Centre in Jurassic Park. The geography of a storm drain mechanically creates tension. You have limited light from a flashlight beam, echoing concrete tunnels. It strips away all the advantages of modern weaponry. This whole sequence takes the global threat of the atomic bomb and distils it into the most claustrophobic, intimate nightmare possible.
Final Verdict
Them! really is the absolute pinnacle of 50s atomic monster movies. It perfectly balances that thought-provoking tension with entertaining ludicrous action. It renders all its copycats and imitators completely irrelevant because it did it first and it did it best. It's far more intelligent than it's counterparts, and happily builds up the tension and suspense for as long as it can hold out because it knows it's trump card, the ants themselves, look great for the time.
One last thing to ponder. If Them! briskly captured the 1950s societal anxiety about atomic testing by mutating something small into a giant unstoppable monster, what is the modern equivalent? If a filmmaker today wanted to capture our current technological or environmental anxieties using this exact same monster in a maze blueprint, what mundane creature would they mutate and what would be the catalyst? Capybaras? Quokkas? Something smaller?
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Them! Director(s): Gordon Douglas Writer(s): Ted Sherdeman (screenplay), Russell S. Hughes (adaptation), George Worthing Yates (story) Actor(s): James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness, Onslow Stevens, Sean McClory, Christian Drake, Sandy Descher Duration: 94 mins |  |
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