9 / 10
Official trailer
Them! is the foundational atomic-age giant-insect film and among the best science fiction films of the 1950s. Gordon Douglas directed. Ted Sherdeman wrote, from a story by George Worthing Yates. James Whitmore plays Sergeant Ben Peterson, the New Mexico state trooper investigating a series of strange deaths in the desert. Edmund Gwenn plays Dr. Harold Medford, an entomologist called in to identify what’s killing people. Joan Weldon plays Dr. Patricia Medford, his daughter and colleague. James Arness plays FBI agent Robert Graham.
The film is structured as a procedural that gradually reveals that nuclear bomb testing in the New Mexico desert has produced colonies of giant mutant ants. The ants are intelligent. They’re spreading. The third act takes the action to the storm drains beneath Los Angeles for a climactic battle.
Them! is my favorite of the fifties monster pictures by a wide margin. It plays the premise straight, it takes its time, and it treats giant ants as a police problem, and that seriousness is what still makes it scary to me.
On a two hundred thousand dollar budget, the film made approximately two million dollars at initial release. It was Warner Bros.’ highest-grossing film of 1954. The success established the giant-creature subgenre that dominated drive-in science fiction through the rest of the decade. Tarantula (1955), The Beginning of the End (1957), Earth vs. the Spider (1958), and dozens of others followed the template Them! established.
The Procedural Structure
The first half of Them! is a police procedural. The deaths are mysterious. The investigation moves carefully. The clues accumulate. The audience is invited to figure out what’s happening alongside the characters. The ant colony isn’t revealed until forty-five minutes into a runtime of ninety-four minutes. The slow reveal is the film’s most important structural decision. The horror is in the absence instead of in the presence. The audience knows something is killing people but doesn’t know what.
The first ant appears in the desert during a sandstorm. James Whitmore and James Arness see it before the audience does. Their reactions tell the audience that something impossible has happened before the film shows the impossible thing directly. Every later monster movie that bothers to do it properly uses the technique. Most modern productions show the monster too early. Them! shows it exactly when the audience can no longer wait.
The sandstorm reveal is the moment I’d point to if someone asked me why this rates a 9. Whitmore’s face sells the threat before the ant ever shows up, and I think that’s the best monster entrance of the decade.
For Writers
Withholding the central image of a monster movie until the audience has earned it’s one of the strongest structural choices available. Them! holds back the ants for forty-five minutes. The audience builds the monster in their imagination before seeing it. The lesson is that what the reader imagines is usually scarier than what the writer shows. Delay the reveal. Build the absence. The monster the reader has constructed will be more vivid than the monster the writer can describe.
The Ants
The giant ants are practical effects. The production built full-scale ant puppets approximately seven feet long. The puppets had articulated mandibles and articulated legs. They could move under their own power on rails, or puppeteers concealed below the camera frame could carry them. The effects work is more convincing than 1954 audiences had any reason to expect. The ants behave like ants. They communicate through pheromones. They cooperate against threats. They protect their queen.
The decision to model the ants on actual ant behavior, instead of on generic-monster behavior, is part of why the film works. The audience learns that two queens have escaped the original New Mexico colony. The biological reality of how ant colonies form gives the second act its dramatic engine. The hunt for the queens is structurally similar to a manhunt because the script understands what ants are. Most later giant-creature films lost this rigor.
This rigor is what wins me over. The hunt for the escaped queens gives the second half a real engine, and I like that the film thinks harder about ant biology than most creature features think about anything.
For Writers
Biological accuracy in creature fiction produces stories that less accurate fiction can’t. Them! used real ant biology as the plot’s structural foundation. The queen mechanism. The pheromone communication. The cooperative behavior. The lesson is that researching the actual organism your fictional creature is based on usually produces material the writer couldn’t have invented. Real biology is stranger than fictional biology. Use it.
The Politics
The film’s political subtext is more direct than most 1950s science fiction. The ants are explicitly the result of nuclear weapons testing.
Dr. Medford’s final speech notes that humanity has entered a new era and that what comes next will depend on humanity’s willingness to confront the consequences of its decisions. The film argues that nuclear testing has produced effects we don’t understand and that the giant ants are only the first of many likely consequences.
Its argument comes through dramatic action instead of through speech. The atomic test sites are dangerous. The tests have changed the desert. The ants are evidence of the change. The film doesn’t editorialize beyond Medford’s closing remarks. The audience supplies the political response. The argument works because the film has shown the consequences before stating them.
Medford’s speech is the one moment I’d trim. The film has already made the point with the desert and the dead, and hearing it said out loud takes a little air out of what the images had already done to me.
For Writers
A political argument delivered through showed consequences is more durable than one delivered through speeches. Them! shows what nuclear testing has done. The audience reads the warning without instruction. The lesson is that fiction’s political work happens through the events of the story instead of through characters explaining what the events mean. Show the consequence. Let the reader make the argument. The reader is more likely to retain a conclusion they reached than one they were told.
Craft Note
The giant-ant practical work is the 1954 film’s central craft. Gordon Douglas stages the desert location photography around full-scale ant models that were the largest creature effects of their decade. Creature features work best when the audience can see the practical work supporting the suspension of disbelief. The ants are scary because they’re physically there.
Does Them! (1954) still hold up?
9/10. It’s the best giant-creature film of the 1950s and a foundation stone for atomic-age science fiction. The procedural structure is rigorous, the ant effects hold up far better than 1954 had any right to expect, and the political subtext comes through demonstration instead of instruction. The Los Angeles storm drain climax is a set piece I’d put against anything in fifties genre cinema. It stops short of a 10 for me only because of that closing speech. Watch it.
