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Them!

© Dane Mitchell Donato

“When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What we eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.”

And so, with those words, the curtain closes on “Them!” And so, too, begins Hollywood’s strange love affair with radiation-mutated insects and other critters -- the so-called Big Bug films that had their heyday during the happy 1950s.

We can thank the Cold War for giving Hollywood's special effects men the inspiration to create the these delightful radioactive monstrosities. Those monsters starred in many films of this ilk. The villains were everything from gigantic praying mantises to gigantic bald scientists (“The Amazing Colossal Man“), gigantic Gila Monsters (as you probably guessed, “The Giant Gila Monster”), to even dangerous, mutating space rocks (“The Monolith Monsters“).

“Them!,” though, is by far my favorite. Released in 1954, the film stars James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon and James Arness. The plot, for those who haven’t seen this film, is pretty much standard-issue monster movie fare. However, the monsters in “Them!“ are not of supernatural origin, as with Dracula and friends, but instead, are monsters unleashed by the evils of the atomic age.

And that is the single biggest reason that “Them!“ is important today. Not because of the acting, special effects and all the rest (quaint is a fine term, and I might even be tempted to use laughable if it wasn’t for the sincerity of the cast and crew of this film), but because the U.S. government is the perpetrators of this particular horror.

“Them!“ turn out to 20’ long ants who, thanks to the radiation from the testing of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs at White Sands, New Mexico, have become not just pests but deadly enemies.

In fact, according to head scientist Gwenn (backed up by his beautiful and yet tough fellow-scientist daughter, a very old stock character in science fiction), if mankind doesn’t destroy these titanic ants pronto, humanity will be conquered and extinct within about a year. That is certainly not much time to get the personal affairs in order, is it?

Thanks to the bravery of stanch heroes Arness and Whitmore (and backed by the might of the U.S. Army), we do manage to defeat these huge horrors in the dank, twisting sewers of Los Angeles, thereby putting off our own extinction for yet another day.

This victory, though, is not a joyful one at all. And that dark, unresolved ending is what makes “Them!“ a classic piece of Cold War art. That darkly ambiguous message, to varying degrees, is present in many of the other mutated big bug films that came out of the 1950s and 1960s: we are tampering with a science that may get out of control, if it ever even was in our control.