A certain kind of movie can only arise from an era of turbulence and WTF’ery. As a child in the late ’70s, I wandered into a theater and caught the end of A Boy and His Dog, an apocalyptic coming-of-age tale featuring a climactic slaughter of elders, grotesquely represented in archaic clothing and whiteface. I didn’t understand anything I was seeing on-screen, let alone the ripple effects of the Vietnam War and Watergate on cinema, but I instantly grasped that the moment I lived in was not a stable or especially sane one.
I shudder to think what kids might take away from Him, a sort-of-horror movie from director Justin Tipping (Kicks) that’s basically an extended hallucinatory vision of how football, masculinity, racism, violence and America intertwine.
The deal
Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) has spent his life idolizing Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), legendary quarterback for the San Antonio Saviors. As Cam heads to the National Football League Scouting Combine after a brilliant college career, the media hail him as Isaiah’s likely successor. But an attack from a costumed figure leaves Cam with a head injury, unsettling visions and new jitters about risking himself on the field.
Enter Isaiah as Cam’s savior, inviting him to his palatial desert compound for a week of training designed to put him back in fighting trim. The regimen and the drills are brutal. The mercurial Isaiah is fatherly one moment and cruel the next, mocking the younger man as he pushes him to his limits. A sinister physician (Jim Jefferies) is on hand to give Cam mysterious injections, while Isaiah’s influencer wife (Julia Fox) teaches him that football is basically just show business with more TBIs.
It all comes down to whether Cam has what it takes to be the GOAT. Or the goat, as in the kind that priests of certain religions are wont to sacrifice.
Will you like it?
I understand why Him is being panned. The movie is perhaps 70 percent MTV-style montages and 30 percent campy chaos, like Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis crossed with the last act of The Substance. It doesn’t build dread in the way we expect a horror film to do, following the protagonist into a too-good-to-be-true scenario and letting us learn gradually with him that it is too good to be true.
Instead, the screenplay (by Zack Akers, Skip Bronkie and Tipping) gives Cam hallucinations that put him in a bad headspace from the start. While the desert compound couldn’t be creepier, Tipping passes up chances to build subtle unease and release it in jump scares. Instead, he packs the screen with flashy visuals: strobing magenta lights, swirling camera movements, real-time “X-ray” views of football players to show us skull colliding with skull.
This sensory overload makes sense, though, because Him isn’t about being stalked by unseen, unknowable forces. On the contrary, from the first scene, we know exactly what the threat is: expectations.
This is a Faustian bargain horror story in which an entire culture conspires to push Cam to sign away his future by alternately love bombing and punishing him, weaponizing family, patriotism and religion. Forced by his loving dad to recite a credo of manly self-sacrifice on the football field, then groomed by his coaches, agent (Tim Heidecker) and scouts to be the next Isaiah White, Cam never has more than a token say in his fate. No one heeds the doctors’ warning that another head injury could leave him permanently disabled, and even Cam doesn’t dare cite this danger as his reason to back out of the Combine.
Withers has a fresh-faced, generic quality that suits the blank-slate role. But Cam shows vital flickers of doubt and resistance that keep us interested in him — for instance, in a deftly written scene in which Isaiah directs his protégé to strip down for a humiliating public medical exam, then mocks him for doing so.
Wayans gives a tour de force performance as a wry, self-hating Mephistopheles. He brings so much sly, layered humor and fury to the role that one might wish the story could pivot around a psychological duel between the two men. But Cam and Isaiah are ultimately both pawns, their conflict a distraction from the forces manipulating them.
Him isn’t subtle about its message that football is the all-American cult, recruiting promising young Black men to serve as fodder for its sacrificial rites. But it illustrates that message with such wild gusto that I found it hard to look away, even when the movie got borderline silly (as it does at the end).
Like so many, Cam has absorbed the hustle-culture notion that the way to excellence is pushing oneself beyond one’s limits. When you put that gospel in terms of flesh and blood and shattered skulls, it’s pretty damn scary. Like the movies of my youth, Him carries a deeper message that none of us is quite well.
If you like this, try…
Black Swan (2010; Disney+, Hulu, rentable): Ballet is another discipline in which the philosophy of “No pain, no gain” is often evoked, and Darren Aronofsky found the horror there.
Starry Eyes (2014; AMC+, Fandango, Philo, PLEX, Pluto TV, Roku Channel, Sling TV, Tubi, YouTube Primetime): In another trippy example of Faustian bargain horror, an actress will pay any price for Hollywood stardom.
The Neon Demon (2016; Prime Video): Yet another example: Nicolas Winding Refn went way over the top with this horror satire in which Elle Fanning plays a teenage aspiring model targeted by cutthroat rivals.
This article appears in Sept 24-30 2025.
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