‘Him’ Wants You to Get Out of Football

At one point near the end of Justin Tipping’s new football-centric horror flick, Him, a character begins beating on his chest, screaming “I AM FOOTBALL” in a pitched-down demon voice. It’s one indication this is not exactly a subtle, satirical indictment of the new American pastime. It is a taxonomy of the ways football destroys your body and feeds on what are presented as our most destructive human traits, relayed in metaphor, screamed into the viewer’s ear with a bullhorn. But the film knows this, and its strength lies in not trying to present its story in any recognizable reality. It’s an operatic, self-contained pain box that offers more stylized visuals than standard horror. The bar for entry is your tolerance for that level of theme-hammering.

The rising star Tyriq Withers plays Cameron Cade, a blue-chip quarterback prospect radicalized by his football-mad father at an early age. As a kid, he watched his father’s favorite player—Marlon Wayans’ Isaiah White—win his first Super Bowl as the quarterback for the San Antonio Saviors. White suffers a gruesome injury, breaking his leg to the degree his bone is fully exposed on live television. We flash forward, and White has miraculously won his eighth Super Bowl ring with speculation he may be winding down his career, while Cade is on the cusp of the NFL stardom his now-deceased father pointed him toward.

One night, practicing alone, Cade is struck from behind by a horned mascot wielding a club. The face-painted apparition cracks his head open, leaving him with large staples protecting the healing wound. It’s an injury that will make football life-threatening, but Cade has no intention of walking away from his destiny. With his draft stock down, Cade gets a call from Isaiah White, who invites him to his training compound in the desert, where he will undergo a weeklong “interview” to see if he could potentially become White’s successor. It’s an invitation that, as you might guess, is not what it seems.

What follows is body and psychological horror that has its sights on America’s football industrial complex. White’s compound is part douchebag-tech-billionaire-brutalist-hideout, part gym-on-Mars, part Judean wilderness—where Jesus was tempted by Satan for 40 days and nights. (The film is overloaded with allusions to Christ.) White is that Satan, a combination of Denzel Washington in Training Day; R. Lee Ermey, the sadistic entity from the Evil Dead franchise; and Tom Brady. Which is to say he’s Tom Brady. White seduces and challenges Cade, who’s forced to sacrifice elements of his body, mind, and soul in the name of football immortality, fulfilling the dreams of his father.

One gauge of a horror movie’s worth is the Twilight Zone Test. It presents a simple and brilliant challenge to any scary premise: Could this 90-ish-minute story have been summed up in a 30-minute episode of Rod Serling’s classic paranormal anthology series? It is perhaps no coincidence that Jordan Peele, whose Monkeypaw Productions company is behind Him, once revived the show for a short-lived CBS streaming series that he hosted.

Peele is the premier genre director of his generation, a genius who changed horror films forever with his debut masterpiece, Get Out, using horror to deliver a brilliant allegory for race in America. The film inspired an entire genre of imitators—Bad Hair, Antebellum, The Woman in the Yard, and so on, alongside titles from Monkeypaw itself, most recently Him. These films all tackle different aspects of the Black American experience, from redlining and gentrification to white European beauty standards applied to Black women, by treating Black trauma literally and turning it into horror tropes.

In Get Out, the technique is skillfully executed and powerfully landed. In its wake, Peele has directly and indirectly produced many lesser films that fail the Twilight Zone Test—movies that have little to say beyond their elevator pitch gimmick (with the obvious exception of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners from earlier this year).

“The game itself is an actual monster that drains a player’s lifeblood and feeds on his insecurities.”

These films all fail because they spend the majority of their runtime hiding their weak hand or give up the game early and then spending whatever time is left repeating their one trick. Him, to a degree, falls into the latter category. Its main and only premise is “Football bad.” But unlike those other films, it doesn’t try to exist in a reality we might recognize. Instead, it creates a hermetically sealed sensory chamber that inspects its message from multiple angles.

Him attacks the trappings of athlete fame, showing the incessant distraction of phone activity, drugs, parties, the worship of diehard fans, groupie sex, and generational wealth through the filter of a funhouse mirror. These pleasures, it says, are as dangerous as CTE. The game itself is an actual monster that drains a player’s lifeblood and feeds on his insecurities. In a neat visual trick, players are shot using thermal cameras with skeletons and musculature superimposed on them, showing the stress and impact of blunt contact on the body, the most inventive manner of conveying that football as a sport is also a kind of body horror. In its most transparent nod to Get Out, the crusty white franchise owner is presented overtly as another kind of owner, exploiting Black bodies to enrich himself in a racist system.

The presence of comedians Tim Heidecker as a predatory agent and Jim Jeffries as a burnt-out doctor, numbed from abandoning his oaths to dope up the athletes killing themselves for the love of the game, should alert the viewer to this film serving as a series of obvious, occasionally fun bad-acid-trip sketches. That fun is largely thanks to Marlon Wayans, who gives Him its only great performance because he has legit chops, knows what movie he is in, and fully commits to it.

Him is about the holes of grief we throw ourselves into in an attempt to alleviate pain. It’s about prisons of ambition and the constantly moving goal line of accomplishment. It’s about football being bad. But it doesn't explore any of the larger themes it introduces beyond their Twilight Zone log lines. The premise looks worthy of a full-length feature, but Him has about 30 minutes’s worth of ideas.

The Latest