Where does fear live? Does it sit in the body, heavy and wet, reminding you that you are a living animal? Is it in the brain? That delicate computer in between all of our ears, that can as easily guide us as it can deceive us? From the devil or God or things lurking in the dark? I’ll tell you where it certainly does not live: in Justin Tipping’s new horror film, “Him.”
Hopes were set high on Sept. 18 when “Him” was released with Jordan Peele — the man behind “Get Out,” “Us” and “Nope” — attached as a producer through his company Monkeypaw Productions. Those expectations were not met.
The film follows Cameron “Cam” Cade, a young rising football star who is attacked one night while practicing on his own. He sustains a brain injury and must skip the league’s combine that would allow him to be signed to his favorite team, “The Saviors.” Cade is given a second chance when his hero — quarterback Isaiah White — approaches him and tells Cade he can potentially join the team after spending a week at White’s home and private training facility, that White calls church.
White, who himself miraculously recovered from what should have been a career-ending injury, instructs Cade to inject himself with blood to speed recovery. Cade suffers hallucinations and harassment as he trains, and is pulled deeper into White’s strange world.
The film suffers from several problems, including its choppy writing and editing. One scene almost never leads directly into the next, instead having constistent time skips of minutes or hours. It’s rough; there’s no continuity. At first, I liked it — it induced a feeling of dizziness and memory loss. I felt like I had a head injury. But quickly, that style started to cause problems. The fragmented nature moved too fast, with too much confusion. I couldn’t tell what was happening enough to be scared of what might happen next.
Good horror lives not in excessive violence, but in the awful moment of tension before the violence. It’s the seconds of silence when you know something terrible is about to happen, but there’s nothing you can do about it. It makes you squirm by giving you time to squirm. “Him” lacked that drama, so it lacked that horror.
But the film felt like it even lacked the cheap scares. I don’t like jumpscares much, but I found myself wishing for one. “Him” almost never showed on-screen violence. Instead, it would cut to stylized x-rays, showing the bones and organs in high contrast black and white, rather than the actual people. The emphasis was on the body, not the man. In a stronger film, this may have worked thematically, but in this project, it only served to further interrupt an already disjointed film and create distance from a disappointingly weak sense of fear.
As for the main character, Cade was not quite charming nor innocent enough for me to be scared for him. He was physically stronger than most people he was on screen with and was never trapped in a way that mattered. More importantly, Cade never seemed scared for himself.
I also was never scared of him; I didn’t believe him when he claimed to be obsessed. I never saw a killer in him, never any fire or danger in his eyes. Everyone he hurt seemed to be accidental, or in self-defense.
Cade lacked both agency and innocence. Sitting somewhere between Laurie Strode from “Halloween” and Patrick Bateman from “American Psycho,” Cade made me feel nothing.
The final initiation test is a sacrifice in the style of gladiatorial combat, wherein Cade and White face off against each other. The ending was an unmitigated disaster. It featured one of my favorite shots in the film, when Cade emerges, bloody and victorious out of an inflatable tunnel, billowing and white behind him, and strikes the “Birth of Venus” pose. That’s about all I liked about the ending. It’s rushed, messy and introduces entirely new concepts. I laughed.
“Him” wasn’t all bad, it just didn’t work together. The film is a loose grab-bag of concepts I like: the brutalization of the male body as a horrific phenomenon, religious and animal imagery and symbolism, a critique of sports fan culture, the profiting off of pain for the sake of entertainment and richly colored, decently lit cinematography. Unfortunately, it quickly falls apart. At times, it felt like a movie designed not to be a good film, but to be cut into an absolutely stellar trailer.
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“Him” was an excellent trailer, but it is not a good film. I had been excited to see “Him” but I left befuddled and let down. Far from the “greatest of all time,” the film may very well have been a waste of time. If you find yourself one day with nothing to do, it makes for an entertaining watch with friends or family, but as a horror film and work of art, “Him” disappoints.
Addison Fulton is the culture editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on X @dailylobo
