Them! (1954) Review

 Them! (1954) Review

 

Welcome back to Clayton’s Creepy Cinema!

I’m returning to one of my favourite sub-genres of horror this month: what I like to call killer animal films (otherwise known as natural horror or animal attack), and to start things off we have a 50’s sci-fi/horror classic, which is one of the first giant bug movies as well as one of the earliest entries in a decade-long run of atomic-themed horror films.

A couple cops are driving through the New Mexico desert on patrol. One of them is played by James Whitmore, who had many notable film roles throughout his career, but I know him best as Brooks from The Shawshank Redemption. A helicopter flying overhead alerts the cops about a lost girl wandering through the desert, and when they find her, she won’t speak and has a blank look on her face. This opening is truly unsettling, and you can see how the film as a whole has influenced many other horror films and shows. The zombie girl wandering alone on the street in the series premiere of The Walking Dead strongly evokes the opening of Them!

The cops investigate a scene of destruction at a trailer and find lots of evidence for an attack that doesn’t make much sense, including sugar cubes scattered about and unidentifiable footprints. There are also strange screeching, squealing noises, which the ants emit, and it adds to the creepy atmosphere, constantly being heard but not connected with the creatures until nearly the half-hour mark. After James Whitmore’s partner mysteriously disappears, an F.B.I agent and a couple scientists are sent to help investigate, and discover the horrific truth: atomic testing has created a breed of giant ants. The first time you see one of the giant ants is actually pretty freaky. The characters are out in a sandstorm and they hear the squealing noises, then one of the beast’s crawls over a sand dune without any music to punctuate its arrival—a first-reveal very similar to that of Godzilla in the original Godzilla, though I think that just happens to be a coincidence since the two films only came out a few months apart.  

They discover there’s a whole colony of the ants living underground in the desert, and one famous shot has the characters peering down from a helicopter and seeing one of the ants. It drops something from its mandibles which falls down the hill, at which point it becomes clear the object is a human rib cage, and it comes to rest amid numerous human skulls, including the remains of the cop who disappeared early on. Once the colony is eliminated it seems the threat has been neutralized, but the scientists point out that the queen ants have wings and three of them have relocated elsewhere, which means the entire planet will be threatened if they are not found and destroyed.

Them! might seem like one of those outdated creature features given its age, but it holds up surprisingly well. The premise sounds generic, and kind of is/was, even for its time, but it takes a fairly realistic approach to the concept, which may sound hard to believe, but is true. The scientist characters fill in the info for the main characters, who aren’t experts by any means, and make logical decisions in their attempts to deal with this bizarre and terrifying problem.

James Cameron’s Aliens makes several references to Them!, with the little girl Newt carrying around a broken doll’s head and being the only survivor of the alien attack on the colony and not speaking when they first find her: all the same as the girl from the opening of Them! The marines going into the alien hive also mimics the scientific team going into the ant hive. You could chalk it up to Cameron simply making his aliens more like real ants and not intentionally copying Them! but then when you think back to the imagery of Ripley using a flamethrower to torch the eggs with the queen alien in the background and compare it with nearly identical imagery of flamethrowers blasting at the queen ant, the similarities are just too close to deny.

Them! may not have the same kind of ageless qualities as other giant monster movies like King Kong or Godzilla, but it set the bar very high for this particular type of killer animal film, and is still worth watching today. It begins with plenty of suspense and implications of the creatures before they are glimpsed, and their screen time is pretty minimal in the first half. The effects are undeniably dated, but not in the same way as other flicks of the same era are with stop motion effects or obvious miniatures. There’s enough filmmaking expertise at work that the concept still holds a fear factor all these years later.