THEM & THEM!
“GO TO” HORROR PICS SHARE TITLES, SFX, AND SCARES!
by
Tom Lavagnino
Separated by a half-century (and an exclamation point!), two classic films in the horror canon utilize the title THEM — but most cinema fans (even die-hard ScareTubers) are probably only familiar with the 1954 edition.
You remember THEM! It’s the “giant ants” pic, starring James Whitmore and James Arness, which exists as a veritable poster child for the Cold War-centric, reckless atomic-bomb and scientific-testing, monstrous-mutations-of-insects-and-animals genre of the 1950’s (see also TARANTULA! and the original THE FLY).
You undoubtedly recall its opening sequence, too: The super-creepy bit of business that showcases a visibly traumatized little girl wandering aimlessly across the New Mexico desert. The film’s black & white presentation of this in-broad-daylight terror, coupled with its hyper-intelligent, Jacques Tourneur-esque resistance to “show” the monstrous ants (you recall, I’m sure, that they don’t appear until 28 minutes in), results in complete and total audience engagement; the incipient horror is there, you feel it, but you can’t see it (yet), and so you were just as shocked as everybody else in the movie when those giant mutations finally materialized.
After the desert ants are dramatically confronted-and-killed (you cannot have forgotten the flamethrowers!), the action moves to Texas, and then on to Los Angeles, as our heroes track the rampaging (and soon-to-breed) “queen ants” from state to state. And you certainly recall those climactic Los Angeles river sequences, which escalate into white-knuckle intensity as the ants are brazenly tracked into the dark, murky dread of the city’s sewers adjoining the river.
THEM! has always been acknowledged as a significant cut above the usual 1950’s-set monster movie. Director Gordon Douglas (who went on to helm Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley pics) prompted unusually naturalistic performances from his actors, and the film’s scenes of ant-attack horror are effectively counterpointed, time and time again, with “everyday” terror; among the surprisingly eerie moments in the movie is a sequence set in a Los Angeles insane asylum featuring characters who “saw giant ants” marauding the city streets (remember the scene?) (it’s as sinister and realistic as anything in Sam Fuller’s SHOCK CORRIDOR).
But the most resonant component of THEM! (and you MUST remember THIS!) is its sound effects work. Cicada-like “ant tones” crop up at the outset of the story (without any visual accompaniment, of course), and are modulated, with varied intensity and timbre, throughout the entirety of the film; the result is a cacophony of audio horror that is truly unforgettable (which explains why you’ve never forgotten it!). (Trivia Note: Those sounds were repurposed bird-voiced tree frog recordings, with the cry of an occasional gray tree frog deftly mixed in there, too.)
But if the sound effects in THEM! were distinctive, the decibel cues utilized in the 2006 French horror film THEM are unquestionably their equal in power and effectiveness.
You’ve never heard of THEM? Okay — no harm, no foul. The movie never achieved cultural lift-off in the USA. Yet its moment-to-moment, scare-to-scare, horrific-scene-to-horrific-scene stature has since positioned it as arguably the most terrifying home-invasion film ever made (it was clearly the inspiration for the Hollywood-produced Scott Speedman movie THE STRANGERS, released two years later).
The set-up of THEM could not be more generic: A young couple motors away from the city for a romantic weekend in an immense-and-remote rural mansion — and are subsequently beset, as night falls, by an escalating series of malevolent, homicidal acts (orchestrated, we later learn, by a group of intrusive and malevolent youths).
But while the premise is familiar (albeit “based on a true story”), the horrors of THEM are utterly distinct. Its opening reel table-sets what’s to come with a nail-biting car-breaking-down-on-the-road sequence; the body of the subsequent story, shifting to the young couple and that creepy, isolated mansion, amps up the chills with a series of subtle (and increasingly hair-raising) sound effects — beginning with a creak or two (downstairs), the overt sound of footsteps (getting closer), and then, stupendously and wickedly, a metallic, noisemaking “tin grogger” — a staple of Jewish Purim (which, in this context, offers up a malevolence transcending any deity imaginable) –- that serves to drive the central characters into a frenzy.
Again, as in THEM!, the on-screen terrorizers don’t actually get glimpsed until well into the movie’s rollercoaster 77-minute running time. And like its 1954 cinematic cousin, the climax of the French-made THEM involves a desperate dive into a cavern-like sewer — this time not adjoining the L.A. river, but instead beneath the overstuffed mansion and thoroughfare beyond.
THEM! And THEM. Two peas in a pod. Two scares in the dark. Two horrors for your eyes, ears, and imagination.
Two Halloween “go to’s” — now and forever!
Tom Lavagnino is a playwright, television producer and golfer (18 handicap) living in Southern California. www.tomlavagnino.com
