October Horror Movie Challenge: Them! (1954)

 There are a few movies that are perfect mix of the "Monster" movies my dad and I loved and D&D. This is one of them. 

There is no need to go into detail about this movie; it is 70 years old. Atomic tests. Nuclear fallout. Giant bugs. It is a tried and true formula that peaked in the post-Nuclear world following World War II. The biggest issue here is how Americans and the Japanese both handled such movies and how the monsters were treated.

American movies, almost always, had giant creature mutating from original stock, in the case of 1954's Them! it was giant ants.

Movies like this, and this one in particular, were the ones my dad and I would talk a lot about. Most importantly how horror, in any medium, is always what scared people at that time. This movie is a giant warning about nuclear power and nuclear weapons in particular. You don't need to be a psychologist to figure this one out.

I do want to point out that the person everyone is supposed to listen too is the scientist. So while science and technology might be the root of our terrors, it is also what we believe is the cure.  Compare this to Godzilla where the "cure" is largely getting out of the monsters' way. 

I saw this move a long time ago. And while the science is, well laughable now, it is still a good flick. 

Featured Monster: Giant Ants (and maybe Ankheg)

Though it could be argued that giant "anything" got their start here. I am not making the claim that Gygax etal. created the Giant Ant monster because of this movie, but I would find it hard to believe that they did not know about it.

I would also argue here that the Ankheg looks a lot like that poster above. Not saying anyone copied, far from it, but I am saying that the giant ants of Them are closer to how we played the Ankheg (in single numbers) than they are of the Giant Ants. They are certainly closer to the size of the ants in Them! than the MM Giant Ants are.

This is the start of a long tradition of taking an animal or insect and making them "Giant" or "Dire." It works because it is effective.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2024
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