From WandaVision to Lovecraft Country to Us, nothing is hotter in cinema trends this spring than creepy neighbors! Yes, it’s creepy neighbors, all the rage as we sit in our homes for thirteen months in a row and stare out the back window like Jimmy Stewart ignoring Grace Kelly. Now, just in time for another spring spent trapped indoors, producers Lena Waithe and Little Marvin arrive with the hottest creepy neighbors in town: Them! That’s right, it’s Them, the newest creepy neighbors to dominate our screens and our nightmares with flair! From their pastel 1950s stylings to their all-white visages, THESE creepy neighbors know just what you want: to get off their f-cking lawns and leave their lily-white utopia before they call the cops!
The teaser for Them, a new series debuting on Amazon Prime in April, looks promising. There are obvious comparisons to be made with Us, aided by the presence of Shahadi Wright Joseph, who played Zora in that film, and Lovecraft Country, given the period stylings and supernatural spookiness combined with real-world racism, though I hope things work out better for Them than they did Lovecraft Country (that show seriously crashed and burned). I’m definitely into anything that features Alison Pill smiling like that, because you know some sh-t is about to go down. And there are a few directors’ names popping on the credit list that pique my interest, including horror master Ti West; Craig William Macneill, director of slow-burn psychological thriller The Boy; and Janicza Bravo, who most recently directed Zola but also directed Lemon, a film so deeply uncomfortable and awkward it’s almost unwatchable but for Brett Gelman’s brilliant antagonist performance (Lemon is definitely not for everyone but it shows a real flair for the difficult and unflattering from Bravo). There is a lot about Them that I like on paper, and it certainly looks intriguing—if, again, running up against obvious Lovecraft Country comparisons—and it has TV/s biggest trend right now, creepy neighbors. Could Them be our next streaming obsession?
