Trolling the NFL with horror

It’s sort of wild that Jordan Peele has only directed three feature films, because he so quickly and completely set a benchmark for horror cinema, popularizing the concept of the “social thriller” with Get Out, loading his horror movies with imagery and metaphors for Black American life. 

Horror movies have always been social thrillers, though, they’ve always dealt with social allegory and critique. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was about racial tension in 1960s America, ten years later, Romero took on consumerism and classism in Dawn of the Dead. Nightmare on Elm Street deals in suburban fraud, and Videodrome was way ahead of the curve when it comes to predicting the merging of identity and media consumption. 

Jordan Peele didn’t invent the idea of horror movies containing dense subtext and allegorical meaning, he isn’t the first filmmaker to use the horror genre to offer socio-political critique, but he DID put a very distinct and stylish spin on contemporary horror, such that when people talk about “social thriller” they mean “in the style of Jordan Peele”. (Peele didn’t invent the term, it was used in film criticism as early as the 1950s.) “In the style of Jordan Peele” is practically its own sub-genre at this point, aided by Peele being an active producer of other people’s horror movies. The latest is HIM, a horror movie/social thriller about football.

HIM comes from director Justin Tipping and is co-written by Tipping and Skip Bronkie & Zack Akers and is produced by Jordan Peele and his Monkeypaw shingle. While Bronkie & Akers sounds like a funeral home in a comedy, they are the co-creators of Limetown, one of the early viral podcasts and still, to this day, one of the creepiest (it ranks up there with Pen Pal). The film stars Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Jim Jeffries, and Tim Heidecker (who also appeared in Us).

The trailer dropped yesterday, and Lainey texted me about it because she doesn’t do scary, but HIM looks really good. Withers stars as an up-and-coming quarterback, while Wayans plays an all-time great QB on the brink of retirement, who ostensibly takes the new kid under his wing to show him the NFL ropes. Except the trailer is loaded with weird, gross, and scary sh-t, so you know nothing will be as it seems. Some of the gore shots remind me of Any Given Sunday, and I love the shot of the brains rattling around inside football helmets.

HIM opens on September 19, and while I continue to marvel at the sheer number of movies shoved into September—too many for a typically slow box office month—in this case, the timing makes sense. The NFL season opens on September 4, so following a couple weeks later, when the season is in full swing, with a movie about how football f-cks people up, physically and emotionally, is advanced trolling. It could only be better if they held the movie until spring and advertised it during the Super Bowl.