As usual there are spoilers ahead!
For the full show notes without character limits you can head to the website here.
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.
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