Them! (1954)
Directed by Gordon Douglas
As a result of nuclear testing, gigantic, ferocious mutant ants appear in the American desert southwest, and a father-daughter team of entomologists join forces with the state police officer who first discovers their existence, an FBI agent and, eventually, the US Army to eradicate the menace, before it spreads across the continent — and the world.
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What critics compared Them! to
It's the recombinant offspring of all those science-fiction pictures of the 1950s and '60s in which exposure to atomic radiation (often referred to as both "atomic" and "radiation") or hazardous chemicals (sometimes also radioactive) results in something very large and inhospitable: "Them!" (giant ants), "Tarantula" (giant spider), "Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People" (giant fungi), "The Amazing Colossal Man" (giant bald guy), "The Giant Behemoth" (giant behemoth -- both giant and a behemoth, but more precisely a radioactive ocean-dwelling Godzilla clone), "Frankenstein Conquers the World" (giant Frankenstein's monster atomically regenerated from the beating heart of the original monster after the A-bomb is dropped on Hiroshima), and so on.
This South Korean box-office monster is an overlong but lively descendant of such antique beastie features as "Godzilla," "Them!" and "Monster From the Ocean Floor" (all from 1954, the launch year for irradiated cinematic mutants).
We all remember the many mutant monsters created by atomic radiation in films of the 1950s, the best of the lot being the giant ants in "Them!"
These are [ extremely movie critic voice ] quite dank movies, but the one horror film that feels like the greatest inspiration for the basic premise of Us is Them!
So there’s no way he named his Get Out follow-up without self-conscious reference to Them! , the 1954 sci-fi film in which a nest of giant irradiated ants threatens Americans from tunnels beneath New Mexico, a recompense (a voiceover at the end tells us) for the hubris of the atomic age.
In one scene Herzog records them watching the 1954 movie Them!, in which the scientist-hero, beleaguered by giant radioactive ants, cries, "We may be witnesses to a Biblical prophesy come true, where the Beast will reign over the Earth."
The subtext, which bubbles to the surface in amusing fashion when Herzog films a team of biologists kicking back to enjoy a screening of the sci-fi environmental disaster flick Them! , is that when the earth decides to take its revenge, it won't be pretty.
Pride of place would go to “Them!,” the mysterious 1954 movie about ants in New Mexico that grow as huge as horses after a nuclear test; the stridulation of unseen creatures in the desert makes music—a high, wavering whistle—that you cannot wipe from your mind.
That said, Ant-Man winningly conjures the days of The Incredible Shrinking Man and Them! , cheesy science-fictions, for the young atomic age, that likewise played with scale.
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According to the end credits, the filmmakers used stills from “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” (1953) and “Them!” (1954).
A direct rip-off of Them! (1954) (with locusts replacing ants), this Z-grade atomic-creature flick has everything you would expect in such a film — including an inevitable romance between a beautiful heroine and a handsome hero; laughably simplistic explanations of the science behind the animal mutations; and crowds running from super-imposed images on the screen.
Beginning of the End (Hen’s Tooth) – Bert I Gordon, the kitsch master of nature gone giant cinema, created this bargain basement spectacle of supersized locusts eating their way through Illinois to Chicago as his answer to the atomic ant classic Them!
Its production was a direct outcome of the success of Them![8]…
And after the success of Them! , who else but Burt I. Gordon to make more giant bug movies?
In this way, Falcone’s Thunder Force shares more in common with the films of the Atomic Age like Them! (1954), It Came From Outer Space (1953), or, in a more recent example, The Vast of Night (2020), though the execution of the narrative has a flavor of action-comedies Blankman (1994) or The Meteor Man (1993).
Japan gave us “Godzilla” (1958) and “Mothra” (1961), but American filmmakers also capitalized on the nuclear hysteria by cranking out plenty of minor box-office hits—like “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” (1953), “Them!” (1954), “It Came from Beneath the Sea” (1955), “Tarantula” (1955), “The Blob” (1958), “The Tingler” (1959), and this mad scientist classic, “The Fly” (1958)—which posters proclaimed was “The monster created by atoms gone wild!”
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True, many 1950s horror and science-fiction movies tried to suggest their radioactive bugs and resurrected dinosaurs were more apocalyptic than comic-book; the most famous example of this occurs in 1954's "Them!," when scientist Edmund Gwenn, dumbfounded by the presence of giant ants, intones: "We may be witness to a biblical prophecy come true -- 'And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beast shall reign over the Earth.' " Even so, there's something particularly wonderful and shameless about Corman linking the Western World's most sacred text to his cut-price tale of crustacean telepathy and carnage, as if an Old Testament context might actually cause the Saturday-sinnin', Sunday-forgiven teens at the local drive-in to react with awe rather than guffaws when Corman's giant prop crab claw swings into the frame.
He had no shame when it came to borrowing ideas; this Big Bug movie rips off Them! just as had his Beginning of the End from the year before -- it even has the same writer, George Worthing Yates.