21. Them! The 1954 Horror Sci-Fi that Spawned Big Bug Cinema

As usual there are spoilers ahead!

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Description

Them! (1954) is the 6th film we are covering from the 1950s. Hollywood is beginning to realise that sci-fi is a money making genre! The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms from the year before was a big hit for Warner Brothers and Them! followed suit. Another nuclear monster but this time it’s giant ants! Them! was the very first big bug feature and is often considered the greatest of the genre. It sits firmly between the horror and sci-fi and leaves a legacy that echoes beyond just big bugs into films like Aliens and A Quiet Place.

 

The Experts

Thomas Doherty is a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, he is a cultural historian with a special interest in Hollywood cinema on which he has written extensively including the book Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s.

Matthew Rule-Jones is a senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter and the author of Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualising Cultural Anxiety.

 

 

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:23 The first Big Bug film: Atomic to hydrogen bombs

03:49 The quality of Them!

05:24 Matt’s first experience of watching Them!

10:08 Boredom v terror, the silent generation and flame throwers in Japan

14:48 US vs UK interpretations in the post-war period

20:15 Scientists and heroes

25:15 The Ants!

28:38 Feminism

31:08 Sounds design and the Wilhelm Scream

33:51 The horror in Them!

39:01 The LA river

40:00 1954 Brown vs Board of Education: the seeds of change

43:10 Legacy

50:41 Recommendations

 

 

NEXT EPISODE!

Next episode there is an “end of year” episode which will include parts of conversations over the last nine months (since the launch) that were edited out before release. There are some bits I planned for the end of the year and others that I reluctantly took out because I like to keep my podcast episodes to 45 minutes. (And yes, I know I fail almost every single time!)

 

CORRECTION: I stupidly say Alien at 49:50 when I obviously mean the sequel Aliens.

 

Show notes

• IMDB pages for director Gordon Douglas who began acting in the 1930s , David Weisbart and George Worthing Yates.

• You can learn more about development of the hydrogen bomb here.

• You can learn more about the 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki here, here or here.

• An interesting overview of how TV affected Hollywood.

• Susan Sontag’s essay The Imagination of Disaster can be read here.

• This article was very useful in helping inform some of the discussion.

• Tom is referring to the Silent Generation that came before the Boomers and experiences the depression and World War 2. You can read an overview here.

• An example of the Them! pressbook. The part about recruitment for Them is from the book Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds By Jeff Smith.

• Tom also wrote the book Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II.

• You can learn a little about the post-World War II British film industry in this article here.

• Calder Hall was the first commercial nuclear power station. It was based in Sellafield, UK.

• Better living through chemistry is a well known phrase originally adapted from DuPont’s slogan “Better Things for Better Living… Through Chemistry”.

• You can view the Mad Scientists episode of the podcast which looks at the history and role of the mad scientist in sci-fi and the proliferation of mad scientist movies in the 1940s.

• Mark Jancovich is Professor Emeritus of film and television studies at the University of East Anglia. He has written/edited many books.  

• You can read more about the Wilhelm scream here and watch a short overview on this YouTube video.

• Alamogordo is where the Trinity test (the first explosion of an atomic bomb) took place in 1945.

• You can learn a bit about Brown v Board of Education here and here.

• Duane Jones was the lead in the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. You can read more about him in this article.

• The IMDB pages for Aliens and Attack of the Crab Monsters.