Part of the A Nightmare on Franklin Street 2026 series**********************************************************
Note: This film will be shown in the Taylor Screening Room.
1h 34m / Not Rated / Horror, Sci-Fi
You know the story. Nuclear weapons testing irradiates some animals (in this case, ants), turns them big, starts them on a path of widespread destruction. It’s all on the poster. What’s interesting about Them! is the quality of its filmmaking; it’s designed and shot (and budgeted) like your average B-feature, but the pacing is taut, the script is cohesive and the direction is genuinely inspired. Like Godzilla, it almost feels like a documentary, and the characters’ decisions feel natural and understandable. They react to giant ants the way you’d expect people in 1954 to react to giant ants, which in a creature-feature like this is incredibly refreshing.
But the second most interesting part is the story behind the plot; Them! predates Godzilla by a few months. And both were behind the first “atomic bomb wakes up a giant monster” movie: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms from 1953. In the early post-Hiroshima days, we knew that nuclear radiation could cause mutations, sort of — the knowledge that genetic information was carried by DNA was less than a decade old — and a lot of imaginations combined the visceral, visual excitement of King Kong and the novel idea of mutation, and defaulted to “maybe they get real big?”
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A Nightmare on Franklin Street series is presented by Bank of America. View the full series at https://tampatheatre.org/nightmare
Event venue
Tampa Theatre, 707 N Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602-4400, United States
Tickets
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