About the Movie
It starts small, the way the best monster movies do. A little girl is found wandering the New Mexico desert, catatonic, clutching a broken doll. A trailer nearby has been torn apart from the inside. Then the police find a strange footprint in the sand, and a sound starts carrying across the night — a high, rhythmic chirping that no one can place. FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness) and scientist Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) piece together what the desert is hiding: ants, mutated by the first atomic bomb tests nine years earlier, grown to the size of trucks, and organizing.
Director Gordon Douglas keeps the creatures off screen for a long stretch, building the film out of evidence — tracks, acid burns, a sugar shipment stolen in the night — so that when the giant ants finally appear, rearing over a ship’s hold and a storm drain, they land with real weight. The action moves from desert nests torched by flamethrower teams to a final stand in the concrete flood channels of Los Angeles, where two lost children have to be found before the colony can be burned out. It runs a tight 94 minutes and never wastes one of them.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
THEM! is the film that defined the atomic monster movie. There were giant creatures before it, but this was the first to weld the monster directly to the bomb — not as a metaphor pasted on afterwards, but as the plot itself: the desert where the first atom bomb was lit is where the horror crawls out. Warner Bros. gave it an A-picture budget, a serious cast, and a procedural tone, and audiences responded by making it one of the studio’s biggest hits of 1954.
Its template — scientists and soldiers arguing over evidence while the threat multiplies just out of sight — was copied by a decade of imitators, most of them cheaper and none of them better. The ants themselves, full-size mechanical builds operated on set, still look convincingly heavy and physical. Seventy years on, this remains the giant-bug movie every other one is measured against.
