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Director: Gordon Douglas Starring: James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness, Onslow Stevens, Sean McClory, Chris Drake Screenplay: Ted Sherdeman Country: USA

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Them was the first horror film I ever saw. 8 years old and just home from swimming lessons, I plonked myself down in front of the midday movie on Channel 10, and this was what I got. I was hooked for life. It's weird to think that watching a tale of giant ants was to get me ready (admittedly some many years later) for the ultra-violent excesses of the All Night Long series, but there you go…

The first reel plays out like a pretty standard mystery flick. A catatonic little girl is picked up by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere (a la Newt from Aliens), near White Sands, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and about three miles from an abandoned trailer by a couple of likeable coppers, Ben Petersen and his younger partner Ed. The trailer is all stove-in, like a giant used it for a football. It's a mess, and the police are understandably mystified – the only clues are a blood-soaked shirt, a fired revolver, some money that wasn't stolen, and some physical evidence including footprints the boys in blue can't even begin to identify. And sugar. Cubes of sugar, lots of them.

The boys send for the fellas from the lab, and in the investigating of the accident scene, they hear a strange sound they're going to learn to fear. The little girl comes to, but the guys don't notice. More fool them. When they head back to the general store, they find the same level of carnage having happened, with most of the store left like the Marie Celeste – meal being cooked, scenes of domestic normalcy abound. But also there's a great big fuck-off hole in the wall and something obviously very bad has happened. A .30-30 rifle is found, inexplicably broken, and the body of the shop owner, Gramps. And there's that sugar again, a barrel ripped open, and again the money not taken from the till. Oh, and there's that noise, as Ed is left by himself in the dark – he unloads his pistol into something off-screen, screams and then…

So, the coppers are baffled – time to bring in the egg-heads, in time-honoured 1950s fashion. First the FBI turn up in the shape of agent Robert Graham, then from the Department of Agriculture, Doctors Medford (plural intended). It turns out that Gramps could have died in one of many different ways, the last having being injected with 20 times the lethal amount of Formic acid – as one of the characters puts it – "one for Sherlock Holmes." The two Doctors Medford turn up, one who is the usual stereotype of the doddering eccentric old scientist (more than vaguely Yoda-like), the other, his daughter Pat is a saucy minx indeed. They proceed to get the little girl talking via a whiff of Formic acid – she keeps screaming "Them! Them!" in a terrified manner – and it looks like we're in the right ballpark. Something is indeed amiss.

And so it's back out to the desert to the place where the original trailer was found, winds a-howling and sand a-blowing. And this is where our first big scare appears, in the form of a giant ant. Now you young folk might scoff with your CG, but this was truly frightening at a young age, and the image of Officer Petersen taking this thing out in the only way possible – with a nickel-plated Tommy-Gun to the antennae – this kind of has resonance with a Romero-savvy crowd trying to take out the zombies with a shot to the head. I have never forgotten this scene – I want it played at my funeral.

Anyhoo, the brave gang of giant ant hunters, having found the nest, blast it back to the Stone Age with phosphorous charges fired from bazookas and then bung a whole bunch of cyanide gas down it to kill all of our Formicidae friends. Problem solved – well, you'd like to think so, but it would appear that someone has underestimated our six legged noses-on-knees pals. They've buggered off to the Big Smoke (remember: some ants – like the Queens – have wings…), where the pickings will be a bit more fulsome, and where hopefully the natives aren't armed with flame-throwers. Now who's underestimating who?

One Queen has landed on a naval vessel, the SS Viking, and spawned a nest. The boat has been sunk, but we soon get a picture of a giant ant diaspora – they could be anywhere, and sightings start cropping up on a national level. Tension rises, off-set with brief scenes of expository egg-head dialogue to fill in the blanks, and keep the story simmering, rather than have it explode into cheap histrionic melodrama, like so many bad horror films before and since.

Petersen and Graham go on the hunt in Los Angeles, and thanks to the ramblings of a drunk, find a more than likely locale for the bad-tempered militaristic insects to start their evil-empire building again – a sewer outlet near the river bed, with its own ready-made tunnels for the hungry critters to make into a nest. Time for the good-guys to make a stand!

The Marines are called in, and the press (representing the general public?) get very nervous – what the hell's going on, they ask. And well they might. A press conference is called, and the public are informed of the potentially disastrous situation. Martial law is declared in Los Angeles – and it's kind of weird just how acquiescent the people are about it, not to mention the fact that they buy the story entirely, and without question. That's just the context, I guess – remember the national hysteria that erupted after Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast? Back in the day you believed what you saw or heard without questioning.

Petersen, Graham and the troops prepare to move in to face off against the marauding interlopers, and we hit the final act. Isn't it annoying when reviewers refuse to hint at the ending? All I'm telling you is that it will indeed have you at the edge of your seat, and it's pretty damn good stuff. There's a reason I keep going back to this movie – and one why you should do the same.

The performances are credible – you gets what you pays for, really. It's a fifties horror flick; the characters are more types than individuals. – the eccentric scientist, the hot girl who is more than just eye-candy (but can still summon up a real scream when she has to), the square-jawed heroes; you know the drill. It summons up the feel of the era that created it with the paranoid response to an external threat, the idea of an impending unstoppable apocalypse, the at times noir-esque dialogue, the scenes of expository dialogue that you'd never get today, the moral certainties delivered to us in (no pun intended) black and white, and the somewhat high-handed moralising about what science may have done with the advent of the atomic age and the whole, "what have we done to Nature" routine is meant sincerely. You couldn't make this film now in the same way, although The Host certainly tried to admirably, and at which the god-awful Cloverfield dismally failed. You young players might find the whole thing a bit risible given the rather primitive special effects – but to an aging movie fan, that adds to the charm, and makes you work at the willing suspension of disbelief, which, if you can achieve it, makes it all the more rewarding. The fact that the whole thing is played totally straight adds to the pull of the story, and draws you right in – there's no post-modern distancing or tongue-in-cheek humour – this one goes for the scares.