How giant bug movie THEM! changed monster movies forever
Exploring the classic giant monster movie that came before Godzilla and Jurassic Park
The first big bug feature, Them! is often considered the greatest of the genre.
This time we have two videos to share—both of which discuss the impact of the groundbreaking giant-bug-movie Them! One of the first of the 1950s “nuclear monster” movies, Them! hit theaters in 1954.
The screenplay was based on an original story by George Worthing Yates—whose screenwriting credits would go on to include sci-fi monster classics like It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), and King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962).
The movie Them! starts when a nest of enormous, irradiated ants is discovered out in the desert in New Mexico. After the ants escape to establish new colonies, the search that follows ends in a battle with the last surviving colony in Los Angeles.
The first video below, from the folks at Mystery Crunch, offers a whole list of behind-the-scenes details about Them! This includes why the title has an exclamation point (the answer is creepier than you expect), real atomic mutations that happened AFTER the movie came out, the blacklisted writer who finished the script in secret, and why Japan banned the movie for more than 30 years.
The second video below comes from the website Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever. This includes discussions with Thomas Doherty, a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, who wrote Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s; and Matthew Rule-Jones, a senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter, and author of Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualising Cultural Anxiety.
Notes Doherty:
“Many of the reviews (of Them!) at the time speak of the hydrogen bomb, and I think that is the moment that America and world culture realizes that we have a device that can destroy mankind. The hydrogen bomb is a qualitatively disastrous leap forward.”
Here are the two videos…
15 Weird Facts Of The Film That Changed Monster Movies Forever (Mystery Crunch)
Them! The 1954 Horror Sci-Fi that Spawned Big Bug Cinema (Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever)
How to find Them (1954)
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Related links:
🐜 Them! The 1954 Horror Sci-Fi that Spawned Big Bug Cinema (Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever)
🐜 70 years of Them!, the giant-ant invasion movie that anticipated the summer blockbuster era (BFI)
🐜 Kaiju Movie Database: Them! (Kaiju Battle)
🐜 Atomic Age Cinema: Them! (Grandma Sophia’s Cookies)
🐜 Them! (1954) (Monster Hunter Reviews)
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The first big bug feature, Them! is often considered the greatest of the genre. We share two videos that discuss the impact of the groundbreaking giant-bug-movie.