Popcorn + Pyres: ‘HIM’

🍿 Popcorn: The Surface Pleasures

A Jordan Peele–produced horror film comes with expectations: Shyamalan-esque twists and deGrasse Tyson–level socio-cosmic insights. HIM offers some—but not total—measure of either.

A sports horror about Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a young quarterback groomed from boyhood to become the greatest of all time (GOAT), HIM frames its terror inside the glory-bound helmet of the NFL.

As a man, Cade is meant to take the place of retiring champ Isaiah White, played by the dramatically talented funnyman Marlon Wayans. Isaiah is Cam Cade’s idol, his hero. So when he’s invited to White’s compound for a scrimmage, he accepts with gusto.

After an eerie arrival, it becomes clear this isn’t the dream-come-true he’d hoped. Blood splatter, extreme unnecessary roughness, injury and delirium become the mainstays of training at White’s place.

🔥 Pyres: The Fire Beneath

Ah, to be the center of fandom. To be praised as if a Christ.

What could have been a profound horror story about aging out, coming to the close of power, and becoming a specter of preeminence instead simply commodifies sports deification.

The real horror? The missed opportunities to cultivate depth over spectacle.

You know how household product commercials reduce fathers to blathering fools saved only by their competent wives? Well, HIM treats parental influence like a middle-America detergent commercial dressed as a feature film—when it could’ve said something elevated about how parents shape (and contort) their child’s greatness. Guiding voices toward damnation or ushering them to salvation.

Daddy Cam Sr. (Don Benjamin) is demonized and dismissed.
Mama Yvette (Indira G. Wilson) is reduced to little more than “that’s my baby”.

Still, HIM grazes against some powerful themes:

• What does it mean to be on the way out—to fade, to be forced by time to pass the baton?

• What does it mean to be rising—knocking, bargaining, sacrificing your body to be at “the top of the game” and to play in the big leagues?

HIM certainly has the opportunity to evaluate—rather than exploit— the religious parallels of sports culture, particularly football. The cultish nature of fandom is demonstrated but not prodded. The raising of the star as a god is thoroughly depicted but never negotiated through tension. Iconography of the game—so much like the iconography of the church—is used, but never wielded.

Case in point: the recurring line, “I’m gonna go watch some tape.” By the third time we hear it, we know it’s loaded. Elemental. Sacred. But the payoff? Visually pretty, narratively underwhelming. Because of it, the next scene lands like a pigskin pancake.

🛠️ Craft & Execution: What’s Gained, What’s Given Away

Composition and calibration come into question.

Here’s the kicker, when horror brushes with Blackness, there’s typically a liveliness, a limitlessness—a seasoning—giving it a celestial heat that’s diluted here. Blackness isn’t called in question just because the NFL is dominated by Black athletes. Not just because the two leads are Black. Not even because DP Kira Kelly is Black and a woman.

Blackness is expected to inform the spirit of the piece because the reigning king of horror, Jordan Peele, produced this. And with his name, the expectation for sincere Black-conscious horror is set.

In the context of Blackness, soul—the soul—holds a life-giving meaning. From that place, they could have asked: What is a soul? What is traded—not when you sign on the dotted line—but during the rigor, the training, the bleeding for infamy? And they could have said it from they chest that that is where our anchor actually floats away.

If they had leaned into this, they could have driven home what appears to be an indictment. Not against the athlete—but against the fan. Audiences suspect all entertainment industries are a racket for demons to buy and sell souls. The movie seems to say this dynamic is the very reason fans love celebrity all the more. It’s the reason they adorn themselves, the reason they cheer, the reason they brutalize each other—and even the athlete who falls from grace.

🎬 Popcorn + Pyres: The Judgment

If it weren’t for Marlon Wayans carrying this film on his capable shoulders, HIM would be a visually pretty but offensive turnover. It has vision. It yearns for heat. It even reaches for heart. But what it doesn’t do it with courage.

The courage to go all the way Black.
The courage to follow its own metaphors to their chilling ends.
The courage to trust that horror—with all its blood and bone—is made to hold extraordinary truths.

And that’s what makes this frustrating. Because it’s right there. In the performances. In the premise. In the sacred space between the pads and the pulpit.

If HIM had committed—fully and ferociously—it could have carved a new lane in the genre. A sports horror film that let’s the body be both battlefield and altar.

Instead, it takes a knee.
It settles for cool shots and quasi-commentary.
It leans on implication rather than interrogation.

It’s viewable.

But it could have been revelatory.