ABSTRACT
From its very title, THEM!, one of the more famous and fabulous horror films of the 1950s, establishes an absolute, dichotomous world view in which ‘WE’—the humans—are forever pitted against ‘THEM’—the monsters. 1 The boundary which separates us from them seems crystal-clear. We the audience, along with James Whitmore and Edmund Gwenn, are positioned as noble humans, created by God, struggling against what the film's advertising posters referred to as “a horror horde of crawl-and-crush giants clawing out of the earth from mile-deep catacombs!” For the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans, the world was not so simple, not so black-and-white. Their world contained a broad array of monsters, but the line which separated them from the humans by whom they were depicted and against whom they are pitted often grew blurred.
