Does it seem strange that there aren’t more horror stories set in sports? Until the trailer for HIM started playing before every movie at the multiplex, the most mainstream mashup of genre and gridiron was Night Swim, Bryce McGuire’s feature that followed a professional baseball player in a supernatural recovery program. But professional athletes offer limitless potential for the genre: from body horror to toxic masculinity, most sports leagues are a compelling sandbox for the building blocks of scares. And now and forevermore, Exhibit A in that argument will be HIM, the new feature from filmmaker Justin Tipping.
For some, greatness comes naturally. For others, it’s a lot of hard work. Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) may be on the verge of stardom – a generational talent about to make the leap from college to the pros – but this success did not come without effort. Cade’s father invested all of his own failed dreams into his son, which is why Cade approaches the game with need and loathing in equal measure. Family, as he’s so fond of saying, means everything to him, which is also why he finds himself in his hometown days before the draft, trying to get his head right.
But his head will soon be far from right. During a late-night practice at his high school field, Cade is brutally assaulted, leaving him with staples in his scalp and too much risk for most professional teams. Thankfully, Cade has connections – his manager, Tom (Tim Heidecker), also represents the winningest quarterback in football history, and Cade is able to secure an invite for some one-on-one training between the two. Even with one foot in retirement, Isaiah White (Damon Wayans) is a monstrous talent, overcoming his own brutal injury to win multiple championships with his hometown team. He’s a legend, and the only shot Cade has at getting his career back on the right track.
So they train. At first, Cade is starstruck, desperate for the approval of his new mentor and scared to run afoul of his wife, Elsie (Julia Fox). But as their boot camp continues, the exercises turn more vicious. Players get hurt; Cade does too, and he begins to suffer from lingering headaches and hallucinations that plague him even during his recovery. Soon, Cade will realize the price one must pay for greatness – and that White has given up more than just blood and sweat to become the greatest of all time.
If you’ve seen a single trailer for HIM, you know these training sequences well. In one, a group of would-be wide receivers run routes for Cade, but things escalate when one of the receivers is told to stand directly in front of the passing machine. Every time the young quarterback is too slow on his release, or misses one of his receivers downfield, the wide receiver takes a football to the face. It’s the kind of scene that, when viewed in fragments in a movie trailer, feels like you might have gotten the gist of everything the filmmakers had to say. But what surprises about this and other training sequences is just how effective they are at creating chaos.
Cade has stepped into a cult of personality, and there are few cults of personality quite as fanatical as that of the professional athlete. Justin Tipping and cinematographer Kira Kelly find a rhythm in these scenes that keeps the horror grounded. We know that HIM will eventually lean into more horror-centric elements – the aforementioned trailers also telegraph these choices coming from a mile away – but so much of HIM feels like it’s just a training camp with the world’s worst human beings. Cade is often adrift in a sea of grotesque displays of masculinity, and much of HIM unfolds as the kind of fever dream that would make Nicolas Winding Refn proud.
You know, a JuCo The Neon Demon. Flashy, delirious, and grotesque.
That’s the unexpected thing: despite being an overt mashup of horror and sports, HIM is at its best when the horror is lightest. Much of the credit for this belongs to Wayans, who threads the needle between still-is and has-been with aplomb – and nevermind that Wayans is 54, and the oldest quarterback to ever play the game was George Blanda, who retired at 48 in 1976. The fact that Wayans is nominally too old for the role never even comes to mind; the actor plays White with a truckload of confidence and the slightest gleam of insanity. It would be easy for White to fall out of sync with the rest of the movie, but Wayans never misses a beat.
Withers may have the tougher job – while Wayans gets to disappear into celebrity, Cade is a kind-hearted player more concerned about losing the one thing he’s always been good at. Cade feels almost like something from an Edgar Allen Poe novella, a simple protagonist who finds himself lost amidst a swirl of grotesque masks and music. Withers is the perfect baby-faced vehicle for the audience, and if he never quite manages to successfully set up the climax, that has more to do with the film’s sudden lurch towards a pop-horror spectacle than any weakness on the actor’s part.
I’ve always believed that a good ending can salvage an otherwise bad movie, but HIM proves that the inverse does not hold true – a bad ending is not enough to sink a movie that otherwise has its shit together. While the film lands with a (literal) explosion of blood that feels neither fully earned nor fully satisfying, so much of HIM works in its rare blend of horror and sports biopic. It is genuinely unsettling to watch Cade’s teammates collapse into the fencing position after surviving head-on collisions with the young quarterback. Tripping does not hold back, and the frequent cuts to x-ray photography reinforce, rather than detract, from the culture of violence.
And that’s what makes HIM, flawed though it may be, such an entrancing watch. The characters may make speeches about gladiators and Ancient Rome, but HIM has no such grand aspirations. Tipping and company recognize football for what it is: brutal, exploitative, and lucrative in equal measure. Men are willing to destroy both body and mind for a chance at immortality, and for many, chronic pain is all they will have to show for it. Football was always the breeding ground for horror; it just took someone this long to figure it out. [3.5/5]
