Com­pos­er Michael Giacchi­no will turn direc­tor with a remake of sci-fi clas­sic Them!

While instances of actors or direc­tors decid­ing they’d like to flex their cre­ative mus­cles by dab­bling in music aren’t all that uncom­mon, it’s far rar­er to see a com­pos­er tak­ing on the chal­lenge of film­mak­ing. But with an Oscar and about a dozen stone-cold clas­sic scores to his cred­it, Michael Giacchi­no has all but con­quered his own field, and so he’s now set his sights on a more var­ied test of his skill set.

A bul­letin post­ed to Dead­line last night announced that the man behind the indeli­ble music to Pixar favorites and fran­chise block­busters will soon make his fea­ture-direct­ing debut with a remake of the 1954 sci-fi B‑picture par excel­lence Them!, mod­ern­ized for the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Giacchi­no has already got­ten his feet wet behind the cam­era, helm­ing Marvel’s TV spe­cial Were­wolf by Night last year, the black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy of which now looks some­thing like a test run for his big solo project with Warn­er Bros.

The orig­i­nal Them! (adver­tised as an acronymic com­bi­na­tion of Ter­ror, Hor­ror, Excite­ment, and Mys­tery) trans­lat­ed Atom­ic Age anx­i­eties into a janky yet resource­ful vision of inva­sion by hyper­in­tel­li­gent irra­di­at­ed ants in the New Mex­i­can desert. In a quote includ­ed in Deadline’s arti­cle, Giacchi­no recalls learn­ing of the film’s polit­i­cal sub­text in his boy­hood years, and rea­sons that the updat­ed ver­sion would focus on the Amer­i­can fear of immigrants.

As read­ers may know from hav­ing watched Direc­tor by Night, Antho­ny Giacchino’s straight-to-Dis­ney-Plus fea­turette doc­u­men­tary about his brother’s first for­ay in the director’s chair, the pair spent their boy­hood years cavort­ing about their New Jer­sey home­town with a Super 8 cam­era. (Antho­ny will also be involved with the pro­duc­tion of nu-Them!.) So began a life­long pas­sion for movie mag­ic that was back-burnered for years as Michael focused on the son­ic side of things, now real­ized in full; this is no dilet­tante try­ing film­mak­ing on a lark.

Pro­duc­tion is still in the ear­li­est ges­ta­tive stages, with Giacchi­no cur­rent­ly seek­ing a writer to draw up a script accord­ing to his con­cept. Lovers of mid­cen­tu­ry crea­ture fea­tures can only hope that his appre­ci­a­tion of the orig­i­nal will car­ry over into a new ver­sion that pays homage to the aes­thet­ics and camp-adja­cent tone of such high-grade schlock as the original.