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‘Them’ Is the Must-Watch Horror Event of the Season
Watching Prime Video’s Them is a bit like holding your breath. Your shoulders tense, and your heartbeat quickens as you wait for something, anything, to break the show’s mounting tension. Yet when that catharsis comes in the the form of a jump scare, it’s never relieving. There’s always another breath to hold, there’s always another reason to stay guarded and on edge. This is all to say that Them is truly great bit of horror wrapped around a biting commentary about racism in America.
Prime Video Watch Guide | Them
Created by Little Marvin and executive produced by Lena Waithe, Them is Amazon’s newest anthology series. Structured a bit like American Horror Story, each season is set to follow a different story and collection of characters as it explores, in Waithe’s words, “the cultural divides among all of us and explore us vs Them in a way we’ve never seen before.” From minute one it holds nothing back. Season 1, also known as Them: Covenant, follows a black family in 1950s America who moves from North Carolina to California during the Second Great Migration. As they battle the threats from their neighbors and beyond their world, the Emorys will have to fight for their survival.
The brilliance of Them lies in its blending of frankness and subtly. The show immediately makes it clear that Emory’s neighbors want nothing to do with this new family. Pristinely dressed housewives and dashing white collar husbands taken straight from I Love Lucy routinely schedule dinner parties solely to scheme how they can get rid of the Emorys. Hearing some of the most vile and racist language spit out over gorgeous pies and perfect red lipstick is sickening. Alison Pill’s Betty Wendell has special talent for portraying this hypocrisy, a garbage person hidden beneath a spotless dress and heels. But even when Them isn’t directly talking about the intense hatred the Emory family has to endure, that racism is still there. It’s felt when the family patriarch Henry (Ashley Thomas) walks into a room and every white head turns to stare. It’s there when one of Livia’s (Deborah Ayorinde) neighbors smiles a bit too widely and waves a bit too robotically. That unease extends to the “good” white people in the show. Even if a hardware store owner or a classmate doesn’t initially appear racist, there’s always a lurking terror. In Them even the most innocuous gestures feel like a veiled threat.
