Let me start by admitting that I did not watch season one of Them. Entitled Them: Covenant, it was a source of much controversy among critics and viewers. Many felt the series relied too heavily on racial trauma for its scares and that the show was exploitative of Black pain and suffering. This is connected to a larger cultural conversation about how and why Black Trauma is portrayed, and whether stories can and should be told without centering it. Ordinarily, I would have checked the series out for myself, but the struggle to remain functional during the global pandemic made me hesitant. I may yet go back and watch it.
I have, however, seen the largely unrelated season, Them: The Scare, and while it’s not without its own issues, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not only did I appreciate it on its own terms as dark fiction where Blackness and the Black experience are front and center, I appreciated how it connects with Afro-Surrealism and the legacy of Black Horror writ large, including the work of Jordan Peele, the TV series Atlanta, and various films including His House and They Cloned Tyrone—not to mention literary works like the fiction of Tananarive Due, Sheree Renée Thomas, Zig Zag Claybourne, and Nisi Shawl.
The season’s central antagonist, The Scare, owes a debt of ancestry to fictional monsters like Blacula, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Candyman. The series intentionally blurs the line between The Scare and its human host, who has been dealt a series of terrible blows in life and eventually gives himself over to darkness and revenge. Deborah Ayorinde, who played Livia “Lucky” Emory in the show’s first season, leads this season as Dawn Reeve, an LAPD detective trying to do her job and serve her community against the backdrop of heightened racial tension and anti-police sentiment in post-Rodney-King Los Angeles. She takes her job very seriously and works long hours that keep her away from her home where she lives with her teenaged son, Kel (Joshua J. Williams), and her mother, Athena (Pam Grier). It should be noted that Grier plays her elderly, morally compromised matriarch with subtlety, compassion, and vulnerability as only she could. She is given much more to work with in this series than she was in some of her older horror roles, like Scream Blacula Scream!
One of the things that makes this series work so well is that the characters are all free to be flawed. Detective Reeve isn’t just a tireless seeker of justice—she’s also a neglectful mother who may have broken her marriage through infidelity. She has agency, but she is also in an impossible position, seeking to do right by her community while operating as part of an occupying force. As the series begins, she is partnered with a white homicide detective who is ignorant at best and just might be homicidal himself.
Navigating American White Supremacy is often a surreal and nightmarish experience. Goal posts are moved the way distance can telescope to distort a dreamscape, rules are often imposed or altered unpredictably or suddenly, and a simple mistake can fully alter the course of one’s life—or end it. It’s little wonder that Afro-Surrealism, a term first applied in 1974 by Amiri Baraka to describe the work of Henry Dumas, a writer and poet who himself was shot to death by a policeman in 1968, resonates so well with the Black Experience in the here and now.
According to Sartre, the African Surrealist movement was revolutionary because it was surrealist, and surrealist because it was Black. While Afrofuturism uses science and the literature of possibility to conjure a future where Black people continue to exist, Afro-Surrealism is concerned with the Now. A world where the statement “Black Lives Matter” is still a controversial statement. A world where it is an open secret that compulsory prison labor is a major driver of the United States economy. A world where the backlash to the United States was so intense, so aggrieved, that even now, a felon who has been convicted thirty-four times over still has a genuine chance at reelection—primarily because his opponent is a Black woman. Afro-Surrealism is a necessary response to the absurdity and illogic Black Americans must wade through every day just to function.
Living the life of a Black person in our society cannot be fully or deeply understood through a lens of rationality. In order to portray what it feels like to walk inside our skin, we must reach for speculative tropes, for metaphor, to bring our experience home. One common theme of the Black Experience is family secrets. Perhaps the impact of these secrets and the influence they exert on Black lives and families is amplified because the Transatlantic Slave Trade has brought about a condition where our exact origins and history are often lost to us. When we trace our family lines, we often hit a wall—and our options for overcoming those obstacles are limited. Family secrets play an outsized role in Them: The Scare. The back half of the season unearths secret histories, lies told, and the guilt of a matriarch who, when she was vulnerable and overwhelmed, made a fateful decision that set in motion the events of the story.
Without the brilliantly believable acting and character portrayal of Luke James, much of what this season accomplishes would have been impossible. James plays Edmund Gaines, an aspiring actor who works as a costumed mascot at a Chuck-E.-Cheese-style children’s party restaurant/arcade. I’m loath to spoil the events of the series, but the fact that Gaines’s character name is so close to that of real-life serial killer Ed Gein is no accident. James plays his character with a degree of affection, vulnerability, and flashes of true menace that make him all the more chilling. The character and his experiences hit home especially hard for me as I grew up in the time period being predicted as a shy, sensitive Black kid often misunderstood by my peers. If I had experienced the same betrayals, disappointments, and failures Gaines does in the series, I probably would not have gone so far as to sacrifice my body and identity to a Raggedy-Andy-themed unspeakable horror bent on telekinetic homicide, but things could have gone poorly for me.
I do feel that The Scare’s creature design needed just a touch more work. There is a certain rubber-mask quality to the facial features that even Luke James has trouble acting around, at times. I understand that The Scare is meant to seem inhuman and elementally evil, but those aspects aren’t what make him truly frightening. The real depth of effect comes from the pieces of the host that still exist inside him. That’s why the look in his eyes is so potent, and why, when he meets a similar fate to that of his victims—most of whom are innocents who are in no way responsible for his pain—there is less a sense of satisfaction than one of loss, resignation, and a suspicion that even this is not truly the end of his suffering.
Another issue I have with the series ending is that this is when the story suggests the importance of what has gone before. A figure appears as the season connects with the previous one whose full significance is lost on me, though the reveal is played very well, and the figure itself is terrifying in its use of minstrel-show imagery to create a fear response. I do wonder how effective that imagery is for white audiences, though I suspect that while the specifics of how the portrayal is received are different for them, they are no less potent.
All in all, Them: The Scare was an enjoyable ride that reminded me of an era I don’t often think about and the news stories that frightened me as a boy—as well as some of the classic horror films and television of the eighties and nineties. I liked it enough that I’ll be watching if and when another season airs.
© 2024 Alex Jennings
