"When man entered the atomic age," warns Dr. Harold Medford, our oracle of wisdom and science in Gordon Douglas's sci-fi chiller, Them (1954), "he opened a door to a new world." And what terrors exists in that "new" world? Well, according to Medford, "no one can predict..." But if Them! is any indication, our planet today should be overrun by gigantic, whistling, man-eating ants...Since I was a kid, Them!, starring James Arness and James Whitmore, has been one of my absolute favorite 1950s sci-fi flicks. Like It Came From Outer Space, directed by Jack Arnold, the film views the terrain of the desert as a strange, alien place, where mysteries hatch in secret. "The wind is pretty freakish in these parts," one character explains early on, and indeed much of the film's first hour involves the desert, and its unknown terrors. Is that the wind howling, you may ask, or the whistle of a giant, malevolent ant? You never know...
Them!
This fantastic mutation, caused by "lingering atomic radiation," represents a new breed of pest: a savage ant colony where the smallest warrior is still nine feet in length. New Mexico policeman Ben Peterson (Whitmore) and F.B.I. agent Robert Graham (James Arness), team with the Drs. Medford -- Harold (Edmund Gwenn) and lovely Pat (Joan Weldon) -- to neutralize the colony, only to learn that two new Queens have hatched, flown away under the radar and probably started new colonies elsewhere in the continental United States. If these ant colonies aren't destroyed quickly, mankind will become an extinct species within a calendar year. "We may be witness to a Biblical prophecy come true," Harold Medford intones with a solemnity reserved for 1950s giant bug movies.
Of which Them! is no doubt the cream of the crop. A lean 94 minutes in length, Them! jumps confidently from strength to strength. For the first half-hour (or at least 28 minutes), there is no monster ant in sight; just the wrecked aftermath of the insect assaults. We see a trailer in the desert peeled open like a tin can. Then Gramps' general store, similarly ripped apart.
And finally, before we see even one of the giant critters come nosing up over a plateau, we hear that horrifying, signature whistle...a screech once heard it's never forgotten. These first thirty minutes of the film prove critical in building a mood of tension, suspense and terror, and this is just the kind of atmosphere missing from many a horror flick these days. These thirty minutes grant Them! a sense of place and texture, a necessary pre-condition to being scared...you have to know the terrain.
After the first confrontation with the ants, the film leaps into action-mode with the effective government response (unlike real life, probably...) wherein a mission is launched to destroy the somewhat-larger-than-ordinary ant-hill. This is the point in the film when one of my favorite - and one of the grisliest - images occurs. There's a macabre shot of one of the colossal ants standing astride the opening of the nest, a human rib-cage clutched in its over-sized pincers. The ant tosses down the bones, and the camera pans down the ant hill to a substantial collection of human skeletal remains, including a skull, and the holster of Peterson's missing partner. Grrr. Sends shivers down my spine every time...
You'd think that a movie made fifty one years ago would seem positively antique today, but Them! holds up remarkably well, even in the special effects department. The giant ants look surprisingly mobile and realistic. I think this is so because Douglas and the special effects men wisely kept the ants moving at all times. They rise from their ant-hills, nose into frames, bear down, and so forth, and so we never have a chance to see them at rest and detect their phoniness in the actual film (although stills are a different story...). The editor did a fine job with these shots, and some sequences are classic: I love the multi-layered shot of a ship's communications room, where we can see ants attacking behind an opaque, wall-sized window. In the midst of the shot, the ants crack the glass, breaking in, and then another ant lunges into the shot unexpectedly from the left and crushes the radio man. By keeping these monsters (these special effects...) kinetic, and by seeing the frame as three-dimensional, the artists behind this film have kept their threat lively and viable, even a half-century later.
And I challenge anybody to watch the finale of this film (set in the Los Angeles sewers) without getting at least a little uncomfortable. Robert Graham (Arness) has found the ant stronghold there, but the ceiling has caved in behind him, leaving him with just one machine gun as a line of defense against the ants, gathering at the lip of the nest before him. The ants jut into the frame with their pincers, attempting to grasp him, and his gun jams. He dodges, but another ant attacks from the opposite side. Yikes!
Man, that scene still holds up today, and my wife and I found ourselves starting and jumping with tension. This is a scare machine that works. And nicely -- as my wife pointed out -- the movie takes the utmost care to make the ant threat as plausible as possible. Perhaps this is a ridiculous premise, but I love how the film stops to give us a long, five-minute documentary-style premise on the nature of ants, using real nature footage. Watching real ants scrap and scrape, wage war, and move heavy obstacles (like rocks...) from their path, the viewer is disarmed. A little suspension of disbelief, and suddenly the thought of gigantic ants really is terrifying. These little guys wage strategic campaigns, take slave labor, and protect their own, and we ignore them because of their minuscule nature. Well, just imagine that they were indeed, nine feet tall, it's pretty scary.
Or don't. But anyway, Them! is a ruthlessly efficient scare machine for its time. My mother remembers seeing the film in a theater in Bloomfield, NJ with her sister back in the day, and she still recalls the film as a terrifying one. And really, it is. The movie doesn't play favorites, and at least one heroic character gets crushed by the ants...my favorite character, actually. Dammit!
Although I'm of Gen' X, the generation of Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the like, I grew up with great older films like Them! and Creature from the Black Lagoon on television, and it's nice occasionally to re-visit them. If anything, these movies are even better, more artful, than I remembered. Them! especially so. In some ways, it seems to forecast modern hits like Aliens (with a cleaning out of the enemy nest, and a military response to an insectoid threat...)
And watch out for a pre-Star Trek Leonard Nimoy in a small role!
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