You’d be challenged to find a more gripping, immersive first 15 minutes from a horror movie than what we get with Them! (1954). Taut horror-film openings usually feature a single locale. Consider, for example, the start of Night of the Living Dead, an extended scene, but we’re at (or approaching) the cemetery the whole time as the terror is established. By the end of the car “chase,” we know what’s what. Mystery dissipates, though the hellish situation has only begun.
Them! takes a different approach by spreading the fear around, geographically speaking, fostering a sense of scope and enormity, the idea that this horror—whose exact nature remains unclear to us—won’t be of the localized, personal (what we might call residential) variety, but may be without limit or end.
We start in the New Mexico desert with two cops and a helicopter pilot investigating a call. The officers find a catatonic little girl (Sandy Descher) walking alone, stuffed animal in hand. They pick her up, care for her the best they can, but this poor kid is gone for the time being, and we can only imagine what she’s witnessed.
The officers leave the girl in the relative safety of the police car, tucking her in as if the front seat were a bed, and investigate a camper that has been peeled apart. Or, as if noted, ripped through from the inside. There’s blood on the ground, but not any bodies. No money has been stolen, but there’s evidence of ransacked sugar. What on earth has happened here? We have this desperate need to know, and a greater desire for those officers to take that girl and get out of there while they still can.
The lab guys are called in to try and make sense of it all and identify a print that’s been made in the sand. We think calm has been restored, but we’re still uneasy, and with good reason, because the last thing anyone should be doing is letting out their breath.
The cops motor down the road to check out a local store. It’s dark by the time they get there, and the store is now a veritable haunted house. The walls are blown out. A mangled body is discovered in the cellar, eyes staring up at the officers—and us—in a look of pure and final agony. Why is there sugar everywhere? What was that eerie, almost mechanical—but still horribly alive—sound from out in the distance?
One cop leaves. The other stays, and it doesn’t go well for him, but even then, the action takes place off-screen. We get sounds—boy, do we get sounds. The scene ends; we still don’t know what’s happening, but our nerves are shot.
Them! is flab-less horror. Director Gordon Douglas treats the movie at first as if it were a mystery—an ecological whodunit, because we know that no madman could have been responsible for this level of destruction. The sugar is a deft touch. If you can make an ordinary household item creep out your audience, you’re doing okay. The tagline on the movie poster read, “Kill one and two take its place!”—which would work equally well as a line in a comic book or as a metaphor for life’s existential crises. Whether the special effects are such that they dazzle us in their verisimilitude is almost irrelevant. We are so invested imaginatively right from the first beats of the film that we could see the strings holding up these ants and we wouldn’t care or be less invested and frazzled.
The cast is loaded with talent. Edmund Gwenn is on hand as the somewhat fatalistic—hey, if it’s too late, it’s too late—Santa Claus–like lead scientist, which tells you this is a classy affair, not some clichéd “Let’s squish those bad bugs!” supersized, insect monster rumble. The poster would have told you as much even before you got to those thrilling opening scenes.
James Whitmore plays the cop with whom we immediately connect on account of the tenderness he displays toward the traumatized child clutching her teddy bear out in the desert. He takes a far greater role in events (and national policy) than you’d think would be possible with a police sergeant, as if he was affected so much by what he saw that first afternoon that no one is going to dare tell him to stay in his lane. He cares about as much as you’re ever going to see a horror character care who isn’t looking to save their own skin or that of their flesh and blood.
A pre-Gunsmoke James Arness shows off some early acting chops (which combats the narrative that brawn alone landed him the role of Marshal Matt Dillon), but it’s the foreboding mood that is the main character of Them!; unrelieved tension, until the very last. Big bugs tend to detract from critical acclaim, which is why The Thing from Another World has always been talked about as the superior film between these two early-1950s stalwarts, but Them! makes for an altitudinous anthill to surmount. The sound of the ants is arguably the most disturbing noise—an apocalyptical fanfare of advancing ecological hell—in all of horror cinema. You don’t even need to see these guys to be terrified of them, because they’ve already swarmed our imaginations. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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