Them!: The Giant-Ant Atomic Parable

A small girl walks down the middle of a New Mexico road carrying a broken doll. She does not answer questions. She does not appear to hear them. A state trooper and his partner find her out there in the heat with nothing behind her and nothing ahead, and for the first stretch of Them! that image is the entire film: a child who has seen something the picture refuses to show you.

Gordon Douglas’s 1954 film for Warner Bros. is the founding document of the big-bug cycle, the picture every giant creature of the decade is descended from, and the reason it still works while most of its imitators have curdled into camp is visible in that opening. The film treats the impossible as a police matter. It sends competent adults to look at evidence. It makes you wait.

The procedural that earns its monster

The structure is the achievement. Them! opens as a straight investigative drama — a wrecked trailer with its walls torn outward, a general store burst open from the inside, sugar taken and money left, a body in the desert, a plaster cast of a track nobody can identify. Sergeant Ben Peterson, played by James Whitmore with a working man’s stolidity, works the case the way you would work a homicide, and the film gives him an FBI agent (James Arness) and then two entomologists from Washington to work it with him.

Those scientists are the film’s second smart decision. Edmund Gwenn plays Dr Harold Medford as a courtly, distractible old academic — Gwenn had won an Oscar seven years earlier for playing Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, and he brings the same twinkling decency here, which does something peculiar and valuable to the material. When a man that gentle tells you the situation is grave, you believe him. Joan Weldon plays his daughter Pat, a doctor in her own right who goes down the hole and into the field, and the film declines to make her either the hysteric or the prize.

Douglas holds the ants back for a long stretch. The audience knows roughly what it has bought a ticket for — the poster was never subtle — and the film exploits that gap ruthlessly, letting you sit ahead of the characters while they assemble the evidence. The withholding is where the dread lives, and it is the same discipline that runs through the best of the tradition, the principle I have argued elsewhere is the whole game in the creature restraint principle. Show the track, show the damage, show the face of the person who saw it. The monster arrives already believed in.

The ants themselves

When they do arrive, they arrive as objects. Warner built full-scale mechanical ants — armatured, operated, physically present on the set and photographed in the same frame as the actors, in wind and dust and smoke. They are not fast and they are not fluid, and both facts are used. Douglas shoots them in swirling sand and darkness, in the glare of vehicle lights, in fragments; the limitation of the prop becomes the grammar of the sequence. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for its effects, and what it was really nominated for was knowing what its effects could not do.

The sound is the part people remember longest. The ants announce themselves with a shrill, pulsing, chirring cry that has no obvious animal source and no clear direction, and it arrives before the ants do. Nobody in the film ever explains it. It functions the way the theremin functions in The Day the Earth Stood Still — sound doing the alienating that the budget cannot afford to do visually. You hear that noise rise over a dune and the scene is already lost.

There is one more craft note worth having. Them! was developed as a colour film and, at one stage, as a 3D production; the plans were cut back before shooting, and the picture went out in black and white with only a flourish of colour left in its main title. The retreat improved it. Monochrome hides seams, flattens rubber into shadow, and turns the New Mexico desert into an abstraction of white heat and black holes. A colour Them! would have shown you the paint.

What the ants are for

The film says the quiet part immediately and never belabours it. The nest is in the desert near the site of the first atomic test, and the mutation is dated to 1945. The bomb did this. That is the whole thesis, stated by a scientist in a briefing room with charts, and the film’s refusal to work it into a speech is precisely why it lands.

What makes the parable durable is the specific shape of the fear. These are not vengeful beasts. They are a colony: organised, expanding, indifferent, following a biological logic that has no malice in it and no negotiation available either. Medford’s warning about what happens if the colonies establish themselves reads today as a climate paragraph, and it read in 1954 as everything the decade could not say directly about arms races and escalation. The film’s real horror is arithmetic. Two queens become four.

Set it against its contemporaries and the intelligence sharpens. The 1950s cycle mostly projected atomic anxiety outward as spectacle — the creature feature as a fairground ride with a moral bolted on. Them! keeps the moral and throws out the ride. There is no love story to speak of. There is no comic relief. There is a great deal of procedure, and the procedure is what convinces.

The ancestor and the descendants

The real ancestor here is the newspaper thriller and the police documentary, the Naked City register of men in hats comparing notes, imported wholesale into science fiction. That transplant is the innovation. Douglas was a studio professional with no auteur pretensions whatever, and he shot a monster film in the house style of a crime film, which is why the monster survives contact with the camera.

Its descendants are easier to trace than most. Every film that answers an impossible sighting with an investigation owes it something. The clearest inheritance runs to Aliens, which takes the hive, the queen, the soldiers with flamethrowers descending into a nest, and the arithmetic of a colony that will not stop, and rebuilds the whole apparatus with thirty years of hardware. Cameron has never been shy about the debt. The tonal descendant is The Andromeda Strain, which strips out the monster entirely and keeps only the competent people in rooms, working the problem, which is where Them! is at its strongest anyway.

The line also runs sideways into Japan, where the atomic monster arrived the same year and went somewhere entirely different — the sublime, the mythic, the city crushed as national catharsis, the territory of the rubber-suit kaiju. Them! and Gojira are the same year and the same bomb answered by two industries with opposite instincts. One made a god. The other filed a report.

The case against

It is worth being honest about the drop. The final act trades the desert’s abstraction for a manhunt, and the film’s grip loosens as it becomes a matter of logistics, cordons, and men with equipment. The scientists recede. The middle hour is so good at implication that the resolution can only ever be smaller than what you imagined, and the picture knows it, which is why it moves fast and does not linger.

And Douglas has no visual signature to speak of. This is anonymous studio craft — competent, unshowy, entirely in service of the script. If you want a personality behind the camera you will find none here. What you get instead is a film with no wasted minutes and no contempt for its audience, which in 1954 was rarer than personality.

The verdict

Them! is the rare monster film that would still be worth watching if you cut the monster. The dread is in the plaster cast, the girl who cannot speak, the entomologist who goes quiet halfway through a sentence because he has just done the sum in his head. Douglas understood that a giant ant is only frightening if the people looking at it are worth trusting, so he spent the first half of the film making them worth trusting. Seventy years on, the ants are obviously props, and the film does not care, because it never depended on them.

Watch it as the moment American science fiction learned to take itself seriously, then follow the insects forward twenty years to Phase IV, where the ants are real, ordinary-sized, photographed with a macro lens, and considerably more frightening for it.

Spoilers below

The film’s structural gamble is that it kills its own genre premise two-thirds of the way through. The desert nest is found, gassed and burned — the sequence where Peterson and Pat Medford go down into the chamber with flamethrowers is the film’s set piece, and it resolves the situation the picture has spent an hour building. Then Medford discovers that two queens escaped before the burn, and the film restarts as a nationwide hunt with no monster on screen at all.

That hunt produces the picture’s strangest scene, a pilot in a hospital psychiatric ward describing flying saucers shaped like ants — a small part played by Fess Parker, whose work here reportedly caught Walt Disney’s eye and led directly to his casting as Davy Crockett. It is a throwaway that lands hard: the film pausing to acknowledge that a man who tells the truth about this gets locked up.

The climax moves to the Los Angeles storm drains, and the shift is inspired. The desert was empty; the drains are underneath four million people. Peterson dies in the tunnels getting two children clear, which is a genuinely unusual choice for a 1954 studio picture — the working-class cop, not the scientist and not the federal agent, is the one who pays. The queens burn. The last word goes to Medford, who declines to reassure anybody: the atomic age has opened a door, and nobody knows what else is waiting behind it.