Attack! of! the! Exclamation!: Them! & Tarantula!

Since it is October, time for some themed posts!

Last weekend, my local arthouse held a double bill screening of a pair of classics from the fifties era of monster movies.

Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954):

Police are puzzled by a series of mysterious deaths in the desert.

They quickly learn that a hive of mutant ants, irradiated by the original atom bomb tests, have grown to massive size.

What is worse is that two queens are secluded somewhere, growing fresh workers to support their hives.

Can they be stopped?

The first of the American run of monster movies in the fifties, Them! was released in the same year as the original Godzilla and shares that film's catalyst of nuclear weapons. 

Directed by jack-of-all-genres Gordon Douglas, starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn (who played Santa Claus in the original Miracle on 34th Street), Joan Weldon, and James Arness (the original Thing, 1951) and written by George Worthing Yates, Ted Sherdeman and Russell Hughes, Them! is a terrific thriller that endures despite some of the technical limitations of the 'them' of the title.

Since it is coming at the head of a genre, Them! is fascinating as the filmmakers find their way into narrative and character conventions that are now seen as cliche. 

For a majority of the runtime, the movie is fashioned like a mystery - the filmmakers hold off showing the title creatures until the last possible moment, and the movie is better for it.

This movie has a great first act. Police find a catatonic girl wandering in the desert, and a camper peeled open like a can of sardines. As they load the little girl into an ambulance, eerie cries echo across the desert. The little girl snaps to attention. She knows the source, but is unable to describe it.

The sound design of the ants' cries is deeply unsettling, and works well to build the omnipresence of the threat as the camera pans across empty desert vistas, the source of the cries hidden from view.

The movie spends a lot of time with our heroes as they try to figure out what is going on, and once the menace is revealed, the filmmakers only show the ants (represented by crude animatronics) sparingly.

While the special effects are rough, the rest of the movie more than makes up for it. The cast are all solid, Douglas's direction milks the atmosphere, and the script unfolds at a clip. There is even a scene which is just an educational movie on ants which is great.

A terrific start to the genre, it is easy to see why Them! was followed by so many imitators, which brings us to...

 Tarantula! (Jack Arnold, 1955)

When an experiment to artificially grow food goes tragically wrong, a super-sized tarantula is released from a desert lab and proceeds to terrorise the local community.

It falls to local doctor Matt Hastings (John Agar) and scientist Stephanie 'Steve' Clayton (Mara Corday) to stop the menace before it is too late.

If Them! is the inauguration of a genre, Tarantula! is an example of the genre in medis res. Directed by Jack Arnold (Creature from the Black Lagoon) and produced by William Alland, Tarantula was part of Universal’s push into horror and science fiction in the fifties. 

Released a year after Them!, in some ways Tarantula! feels like a distilled version of the earlier movie. 

Once again we open in the desert. A figure stumbles into view - a disfigured man. He collapses in the sand.

There is more overt sci-fi and horror elements in Tarantula! which make it more fantastical than Them! 

There are elements of body horror in the portrayal of the scientists responsible for the titular monster, although they are relatively benign, not Frankenstein-style egomaniacs.

For me, the biggest difference with Them! is the casting. Them! was populated by character actors, there is a broader, more b-movie quality to the performances in Tarantula! nothing agains the actors - the characters feel more like archetypes.

That being said, that shift fits the more comic book style of this movie. The acting is pretty solid all round - Leo G. Carroll is good as the distant scientist struggling with what he has wrought, and Mara Corday brings plenty of spark to the female lead.

I cannot say the same for the lead. There is something off about John Agar - there’s a slyness in his brow and a tension round the jaw that put me on edge. He is a familiar face in Arnold’s movies so he will probably fit in if I watch more of Arnold’s work. Here, he just came off as a cocky asshole - but that is probably because the role is a prime example of the macho American male who knows when to take charge. 

He may be a doctor, but he is a rough and tumble man of the earth (or desert). It feels like a dry run for 'science v machismo' conflicts of later Hollywood fare. In the end, he is responsible for the very unscientific manner of the tarantula's demise. 

Onto the star of the show.

In contrast to Them! the title role of Tarantula! was played by a real-life tarantula (who would go on to menace Grant Williams in Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man).

The compositing of the spider into the live-action footage is great - the effects team even managed to include its shadow - and the movie gets a lot of tension from wide shots showing our eight-legged hero advancing over the horizon toward the hapless humans.

One downside to the great effects is that the movie lacks the mounting dread and sense of discovery that made Them! so watchable. The movie is really enjoyable but it does feel more generic in its narrative development. We see our boy fairly regularly throughout the picture, which dissipates some of the tension.

That being said, the presence of a real-life spider gives a sense of verisimilitude to the set pieces - there is something disquieting about watching a giant spider stealthily scuttle down a hillside toward panicking horses. 

A running theme of both movies is the sense of American exceptionalism underpinning the heroes' struggle. No matter how dire the threat, it can be solved by tough-minded professionals with plenty of fire power. By the end of Tarantula!, I was so depressed by how clean-cut and all-American the protagonists were that I was hoping the tarantula would win.

The use of military power feels like such a product of the Fifties. Compare the lack of cynicism here with the monster and disaster movies of the seventies, after the double barrels of Vietnam and Watergate.

That baggage aside, Them! and Tarantula! are still terrific. The production design is terrific, and while both movies suffer a bit from being aggressively earnest, that same desire to take their subject matter seriously works. They also do not lose themselves on over-use of their effects - both films are great examples of how the limitations of technology can lead to an emphasis on other aspects of the production. Jaws worked because the shark did not, and the same sense of ingenuity courses through both of these films.

Both highly recommended.

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