1954

DIRECTOR: GORDON DOUGLAS PRODUCER: DAVID WEISBART SCREENPLAY: TED SHERDEMAN AND RUSSELL HUGHES, BASED ON A STORY BY GEORGE WORTHING YATES STARRING: JAMES WHITMORE (SERGEANT BEN PETERSON), EDMUND GWENN (DR. HAROLD MEDFORD), JOAN WELDON (DR. PATRICIA MEDFORD), JAMES ARNESS (ROBERT GRAHAM), ONSLOW STEVENS (BRIGADIER GENERAL ROBERT O’BRIEN), SEAN MCCLORY (MAJOR KIBBEE), CHRIS DRAKE (ED BLACKBURN), SANDY DESCHER (LITTLE GIRL), FESS PARKER (ALAN CROTTY)

Them!

WARNER BROS. • BLACK AND WHITE, 94 MINUTES

Martial law is declared in the city of Los Angeles when a police officer, an FBI agent, and two scientists track an invasion of giant mutated killer ants to the LA storm drains.

In 1954, something new was added to the pantheon of science-fiction cinema: the giant insect movie. As the first major entry in this subgenre, Them!, established the formula that the others followed. Shot in a straightforward, almost documentary style, the movie treats its subject seriously. The casting of beloved character actor Edmund Gwenn—who had won an Oscar for playing Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (1947)—adds credibility to the fantastic concept of ants mutated into human-eating giants by atomic radiation.

No one knew what kind of long-term effects to expect from the first atom-bomb testing in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945. By the 1950s, Hollywood’s imagination ran wild. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) was an example of atomic testing awakening a prehistoric beast, but insects didn’t enter the picture until Warner Bros. purchased an original story by George Worthing Yates about mutant ants in the New York subway. It seemed outlandish, but screenwriter Ted Sherdeman instantly saw the cinematic possibilities. “Everyone had seen ants and no one trusted the atomic bomb, so I had Warner buy the story,” Sherdeman remembered. The Manhattan locations—as well as the plans for WarnerColor and 3-D—were deemed too costly. The film was shot in black and white, and the settings switched to Los Angeles and New Mexico.

Joan Weldon meets a giant ant.

The studio kept the concept and production under tight security. Neither the film’s title nor the early publicity materials revealed that the subject was, in fact, giant ants. The monstrous creatures don’t even appear until nearly half an hour into the story. The film’s first reel ramps up suspense by presenting seemingly unrelated oddities: a dazed young girl is found wandering the New Mexico desert alone; nearby, a general store is ransacked, its owner bludgeoned to death. Even after the myrmecologists (ant experts) are flown in to investigate, they don’t mention the word “ants” until their hypothesis is confirmed.

Edmund Gwenn and Sandy Descher (seated)

The myrmecologists, Drs. Harold and Pat Medford, played by Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon, are a father-daughter team. A subtle back-burner romance is sparked between James Arness as FBI man Graham and Pat as they fight the irradiated insects together. For a change, the female love interest is not merely a passive damsel in distress, but a heroic scientist who insists on entering the danger zone right alongside the men in uniform. It was one small step forward for women in monster movies.

Larry Meggs was in charge of designing the mechanized ant-props that worked by a system of wires and pulleys. Though the ants may not hold up under close scrutiny today, they managed to frighten and inspire a generation of future filmmakers who saw the movie as children, including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. “I believed the ants in Them!,” Lucas has said. “These are kind of corny big things, but they were scary enough to where I believed they were what they were.” Because only two fully operational ants were made, only two ants at a time are seen moving on screen. The audience’s imagination, spurred on by eerie chirping sound effects, provides the rest of the invasion.

If budget restrictions and the absence of technology prohibited a full-scale ant attack, the movie compensates by having terrified onlookers recount their stories. The traumatized little girl finally breaks her silence to scream, “Them! Them!” while another witness is committed to an insane asylum for ranting about huge airborne ants. When the colony’s queens grow wings, they fly across the country stealing vast amounts of sugar, as ants are wont to do. In the case of twelve-foot-long ants, calling an exterminator is not enough—tanks, bazookas, machine guns, and flamethrowers courtesy of the U.S. military must be deployed.

One of two twelve-foot ants built for the film

Edmund Gwenn and Chris Drake

In the final scene, Gwenn gives voice to humanity’s conscience when he muses, “When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door to a new world. What we will eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.” According to movies that followed Them!, that new world would be populated by gargantuan killer spiders, tarantulas, praying mantises, crabs, leeches, moths, mollusks, and even rabbits. These creature features tapped into the collective unconscious of the time, preying on atomic-age paranoia in the 1950s and ’60s. In 2002, the genre was revisited with the giant-spider parody Eight-Legged Freaks.

FAR-OUT FACTS

Them! was one of the most successful films of 1954, earning over $2.2 million in box-office returns.

Director Gordon Douglas recalled the oversize mechanical ants as “purple, slimy things. Their bodies were wet down with Vaseline. They scared the bejeezus out of you.”

When Walt Disney saw Fess Parker as the Texas rancher who sees “flying saucers” shaped like ants, he cast him as the lead in the 1955 TV series Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. That same year, James Arness would find TV fame as Marshall Dillon in the series Gunsmoke.

MIND-BLOWING MOMENT

When the first giant ant appears in the desert, Pat Medford is almost caught in the mandibles of the ferocious beast. This was only a partial-body prop consisting of an ant’s head and thorax mounted on a camera crane.

KEEP WATCHING

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THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1957)