Silent Spring and Them! (1954)

Them! holds a special place for me because I first saw it a B-Movie festival held as part of Science North's winter festival.  These were actual reels of films shown on a projects in the auditorium/cavern and even through that festival only lasted a few years, a have some treasured memories from it: the Bambi v Godzilla short, struggling not to fall asleep during 'Night of the Lepus' and watching Them!.

The first revelation in returning to this film is that I can now see how close Aliens (1986)! Beside their sharing single word titles of ominous plurality, both films begin with the discover of a lone traumatized girl survivor and ends with armed men and vehicles creeping through dark tunnels to find (and ignite) the Queen and her brood to rescue a kid. Kim Newmen's Nightmare Movies compares Aliens to war-patrol movies like Steel Helmet (1951) and Merrill's Marauders (1962) and places it in a chapter dedicated to 80s films with their roots in the 1950s, and it ties to Them! supports this analysis.

It was the sound of the ants that was the second revelation. Listen to the ants in this trailer:



Now I assume most ant communication is done through chemical and pheromones but they also use air vibrations and some species have cricket-like specialized spikes along their abdomen that they stroke with one of their hind legs to makes sounds. Here is a articlediscussing have even semi-formed pupae ants can make noise (with example audio files). Even ants just scrambling around can make a racket with a good microphone to pick it up as this video illustrates.



So any noise between percolating static and cricket chirps would be acceptable, I'd even accept some weird electronic noise, but the sound they chose for the ants in Them! was actually "recorded chorus of bird-voiced tree frogs (Hyla avivoca) of the southeastern US. Occasionally a gray tree frog (Hyla chrysoscelis) can be heard on the soundtrack as well, as these species can often be heard together at the same wetland."



The use of marshland frog calls for desert ants creates a strange dissonance for a rural dweller like me. That chorus is the signature background song of spring and summer nights. even if we have different species of tree frogs, the combination of a high-pitched frog peeping punctutated by the lower trill of the gray frog is unmistakeable. To hear that same chorus emerging from a sandstorm as the wailing of murderous ants feels wrong on a deep level, and that noise is omnipresent during the film including the tunnel-torching finale. It is only when the soldiers finally discover the Queen's egg chamber and torch it with flame-throwers that the noise (and the film) ends.

This final scene, like its counterpart in Aliens, has a peculiar feel to it. Even on the scale of insects, the sight of a moribund queen sitting among her young brood can evoke more pity at her helplessness than disgust at her fertility. Aliens and Them! mitigates against this potential sympathy by using female protagonists to recommend and provide the cleansing fire. In Aliens the Queen Alien literally detaches from her maternal duties to duke it out with Ripley. In Them!, 'Pat' the female scientist (all 1950s women scientists have to have androgynous names) recommends total ant extermination with her vigorous exhortation, "Now destroy everything in here. Burn it. Burn EVERYTHING!" but the actual incinerating of the Queen and ant is done execution style with a line of soldiers with flame-throwers perched above her den waiting only for the order to proceed. "OK, Burn 'em Out!," barks the sergeant and they do. We given a last shot of the giants burning ants still twitching but their long chorus of oscillating and twittering is finally silenced.

Godzilla scholar, William Tsutsui turned his analytic abilities on Them! in his 2007 essay Looking Straight at Them! Understanding the Big Bug Movies of the 1950s published in the Environmental History journal. Tsutsui rejects the common interpretations of the ants - fear of radiation, fear of sexuality, fear of communism - to suggest a very literally one, the giant ant invasion represented fear of normal-sized insect invasions. Tsutsui admits those other interpretations do have some merit as atomic war and testing was a real concern, the fertility of the queen is the major threat in the film, and the director of Them! had done explicitly anti-Communist fare like 'I was a Communist' (1951).
There is a political subtext going on Them! and it seems like a love/hate relationship with our former allies turned Cold War opponents in the scientists peculiar description of ants.

ccc wrote:"Ants are ruthless, savage and courageous fighters. Ants are the only other creatures on earth, other than man, who make war. They campaign. They are chronically aggressive. And they make slaves of the captives they don't kill. They have an instinct and a talent for industry, social organization and savagery which makes man look feeble by contrast."

My motto for understanding 1950s kaiju/big bug films is that "It takes a Leviathan to defeat a Leviathan" - the first leviathan being the govenment as it was famously called by Thomas Hobbes, the second leviathan is any giantic monster. So ambigious quotes about the fearful yet admirable "talent for industry, social organization and savagery" in ants are understandable.

Some combination of gender and state politics are the common explanation given for Them!'s ants, for example Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader (2014) essay on Them! still takes this routes of analysis, which is why Tsutsui's ecological take is important. Ecology brings in many lens and Tsutsui discards some of them, this is not about radioactive pollution, nor do the ants just represent abstract 'Nature', nor is this just a ecological apocalypse, this is about ants and pest control.  The giants ants are shorthand for the collective power of real ants.







These distinctive whistling-type sounds were reused in various other films in the years that followed, particularly in Mohawk (1956) and The Black Scorpion (1957).

The flamethrowers used in the movie were standard World War 2 weapons and were loaned by the US Army. The actors handling the weapons were WW2 combat veterans who had actually used them in battle.