TL;DR: Him wants to be football’s Get Out, but settles for being a sloppy scrimmage. A few haunting visuals and a solid Wayans performance can’t save it from wasting its premise. Not scary enough for horror, not sharp enough for satire. Just flat.
Him
There’s something inherently cursed about combining football and horror. Both are bloodsports in their own right—one sells itself on the spectacle of bodies colliding, the other on the spectacle of bodies being destroyed. And yet, somehow, Him, directed by Justin Tipping and co-signed by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, manages to take two genres practically begging to be merged and produces something so flat, so conceptually timid, that it feels less like a touchdown and more like watching a quarterback kneel out the clock for four quarters. By the end, I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t enlightened, and worst of all, I wasn’t entertained. I was just annoyed that the movie squandered a premise that should’ve written itself.
I grew up in the American South, where football isn’t a sport—it’s a civic religion. Friday nights smelled like fried funnel cake and wet grass. Churches scheduled their fall events around the local high school’s home games. Entire family identities were stitched together in the colors of their favorite college team. So when Him leaned on that old chestnut—“God, family, football” and maybe not in that order—I was ready. I know exactly how absurd and terrifying that devotion can be. This was supposed to be the horror movie that finally said what everyone already feels: that we sacrifice our children, our health, our sanity to the pigskin gods. Instead, Him plays like someone watched Get Out once, skimmed a few Super Bowl ads, and decided symbolism would do the heavy lifting.
The film opens with the Cade family, literal shrine and all, worshipping the San Antonio Saviors. The father declares that his son, Cameron “Cam” Cade, will one day be the GOAT. Meanwhile, Marlon Wayans’ Isaiah White is already canonized as the greatest quarterback alive, a man playing through injuries so severe they should’ve ended his career. Years later, Cam is the one in training, one concussion away from catastrophe, but still determined to chase his father’s prophecy. When he’s invited to Isaiah’s private training compound—already a setup dripping with sinister undertones—the movie should be off to the races. Except it never leaves the starting line.
The problem isn’t the setup. On paper, it’s brilliant: a young athlete, already warned that one more blow to the head could kill him, enters a secluded training camp run by a man who’s basically football’s Pope, and discovers the sport’s unholy rituals laid bare. That’s a horror story I’d buy tickets for twice. But Tipping never trusts the premise enough to dig into it. Instead, we get clunky metaphors, sledgehammer imagery, and the kind of on-the-nose religious symbolism that would make a Catholic high school theater teacher blush. A team named the Saviors. A Last Supper tableau. A literal room of animal skins. Cam hammering a nail into wood like Jesus at Home Depot. It’s all so obvious it kills any tension before it even builds.
What makes this worse is the film keeps teasing deeper ideas it refuses to chase. The ritualistic nature of football fandom, the commodification of Black bodies in a sport controlled by wealthy white owners, the unspoken cult of masculinity that glorifies destroying your body for glory—these are real, relevant, horrifying themes. The script by Tipping, Skip Bronkie, and Zack Akers mentions them like Easter eggs but never commits. A character mutters about rituals; the camera lingers on vague demonic imagery; Isaiah screams “IT’S MORE THAN JUST A GAME” like a sermon. But none of it coheres into something meaningful. By the final act, when the movie does go off the rails, it doesn’t feel earned. It feels like we skipped five chapters in the rulebook.
And here’s the kicker: the movie doesn’t even have the guts to critique football itself. Oh sure, it gestures at the brutality. There’s a doctor who spells out that human skulls weren’t meant to slam against each other. There’s talk of permanent brain damage. But these revelations are framed as if they’re shocking, as if the audience hasn’t spent the last decade hearing about CTE scandals in the NFL. Saying “football is dangerous” in 2024 isn’t horror—it’s Wikipedia. By the end, I felt like the movie was less interested in exploring its own metaphor and more interested in wagging its finger at me for not already being horrified.
Marlon Wayans, to his credit, brings a menace I wasn’t expecting. Wayans can go dark—Requiem for a Dream proved that twenty years ago—and as Isaiah, he’s the closest thing Him has to a soul. Tyriq Withers as Cam, though, is given almost nothing to work with. His entire character boils down to “I love football and family.” That’s not a protagonist; that’s a bumper sticker. For a movie supposedly about testing his psyche and body, we never really learn who Cam is beyond the clichés his father projected onto him.
Visually, Him occasionally flirts with being interesting. Cinematographer Kim Kelly gives us a brooding murk, the kind of moody shadows that whisper “prestige horror.” But the imagery the film fills that darkness with—fans with footballs for heads, a painted stalker lurking in the bleachers—is too silly to unsettle. It’s as if someone pitched Hereditary, then midway through swapped in rejected Space Jam concept art. I wanted to laugh, but the movie was too self-serious to let me.
The tragedy of Him is that its potential is visible in the gaps. You can almost feel the better version of the script haunting the margins, one where Peele himself took the wheel and drove the metaphor home. That film would’ve gone full cult horror, exposing the machinery of American football as the cannibalistic religion it already is. That film would’ve said the quiet part out loud: that football is less about athleticism and more about sacrificing mostly Black labor for mostly white profit. Instead, Him just shrugs and says, “Football is kinda crazy, huh?” and calls it a day.
By the time the credits rolled, I was left thinking about all the horror movies Him could’ve been. It could’ve been The Witch, but with helmets and stadium lights. It could’ve been Midsommar, but with tailgates and marching bands. It could’ve been Get Out for the NCAA. Instead, it fumbles, punts, and loses track of the ball entirely. The scariest thing about this film is how boring it manages to be.
Him had the field, the ball, and the chance to run a game-winning play, but instead it tripped over its own symbolism and never recovered. Marlon Wayans shows up to play, the cinematography tries its best, but the script refuses to dig into the fertile soil it keeps hinting at. What could’ve been a bold horror about America’s real religion ends up as a limp lecture with jump scares.
