We have plenty of sports dramas; we have sports comedies, why not a sports horror movie? It sounds like a great pitch: a movie that excises the strange rituals surrounding the world of sports and makes a visceral meal out of the most violent spectacle that Americans frequently tune their TVs to for pleasure. Football as gladiator combat, with a hint of something even more sinister underneath. That is, ostensibly, what HIM is all about. Except the problem is that HIM isn’t about much of anything.
HIM stars Marlon Wayans as Isiah White, a beloved quarterback nearing his final season and offering the chance of a lifetime to a rising star who might act as his replacement. Tyriq Withers plays Cam Cade, the young gun who is brought into this world of cult-like, extreme punishment and sacrifice for the chance to be the greatest of all time. HIM spun out of a screenplay that appeared on the Black List, an extensive survey of the most circulated and well-liked scripts that haven’t made it to the screen yet. Monkeypaw Productions, Jordan Peele’s production company, purchased the script and brought Justin Tipping on to direct.
The Peele piece of HIM has been a persistent item in the film’s marketing, with “produced BY JORDAN PEELE” appearing so prominently in every poster and trailer that general audiences have no doubt gone under the assumption that Peele may have even written or directed the film himself. Peele’s name is a big draw, and reasonably so considering he has made three great horror movies which are crowdpleasers and critical hits. But HIM is not Peele’s movie, and the expectations thrown at it with this marketing play seem to be backfiring, because it feels purposefully evocative of Peele’s approach to storytelling while being thematically and narratively hollow, something that none of Peele’s movies have been up to this point.
HIM starts with a great idea. All of the prelude to the horror is intriguing, but the horror never really connects. The film’s scares are mostly relegated to a series of incoherent hallucinations suffered by Cade, visions of rabid fans and a large mascot figure taunting or attacking him. These scenes never work, primarily because of how repetitively they occur and how poorly they are cut together. For a movie that presents itself as a sports-horror story, there is shockingly little of either. Most of the film is spent dealing with the backstage dealings that come with the world of professional sports: parties and media engagements, workouts, various recovery procedures. There is only one sequence where they actually play football, and it is the most exhilarating and interesting stretch of the movie, occurring right at the turn to the second act. The rest of the movie has no tricks up its sleeve, and slowly descends into a dull and confounding experience.
HIM lays out all of its ideas before Cam has even been invited to meet with Isiah. The game takes everything from you, so what are you willing to sacrifice? A variation on a Faustian bargain, one of the oldest and most repeated tropes in literature. It’s Robert Johnson selling his soul to play the blues. But HIM is too vague when it does hint toward anything supernatural, until the final ten minutes which take a rapid tone shift into a campier horror presentation that does not work at all, sinking the movie even lower in the final moments.
Though Tipping tries his best to inject HIM with a sense of visual identity, and does deliver some compelling imagery, none of it can rise above the film underneath being fundamentally empty. Tipping’s directorial efforts and the performances are such that HIM is never outright disastrous. It is not the kind of movie you are going to laugh through, because there are some good things happening on screen. Wayans is giving a great performance, and absolutely should do more work in this tone. Withers, who is a relative newcomer, holds his own and does his best carrying the bulk of the film as a character we really know nothing about. Julia Fox is great in a brief appearance that adds levity to a movie that is often far too self-serious in presentation. But all the smoke and mirrors of Tipping’s flashy style and a cast doing their best cannot cover up what was never there to begin with. HIM is one note smashed into your skull over and over again, fumbling the ball well before the endzone and leaving the field of sports-horror still largely untapped.
4 out of 10
This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2025.