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Amazon’s ‘Them’ Is Visual Terrorism
Representation isn’t reason enough to bask in Black trauma on television
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Along the course of writing this essay on Amazon’s new series Them: Covenant — in which I intended to recount my deep history with horror films and how Jaws ruined me for life — Duante Wright was killed by police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Shortly thereafter, body cam footage from the March 29 shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago hit the internet.
As I write this, Black America is reeling, the bodies of our people shoved through a systemic machine that churns out stacks of Black victims. We hadn’t even gotten to the hashtag part of one killing before we are faced with the gruesome visage of a dying child, shot while surrendering. And it is in the midst of this collective grief and anger that I can think of no better example of why no one should engage with Them.
The horror drama series was a suspicious prospect from the start: The story of an already traumatized Black family moving into a White enclave, beset upon by every corner of society and the very ground their home rests on. It’s a rollercoaster ride of grief and gut punches with no reprieve, each episode compounding the violence of racism in escalating beats to a frustrating and exhausting anti-climax that surely would’ve ended in even more horror if allowed to run a minute more.
The racialized violence of Them is like watching the opening-bid stage of a Spades game. One player asks, “How many books you got? Because I got redlining, rape, and PTSD right here,” only to have their partner double down. “Well, I can stack that PTSD with government experimentation, then some infanticide, minstrelsy, and body horror,” they say. And then they proceed to run a Boston.
Creator/writer Little Marvin is on record suggesting all of this trauma is a win for the culture, that all of the Black people I never got to see in horror films are compensated for in Them by stress-testing a Black nuclear family into physical and psychic annihilation. As a lifelong fan of horror, I have to ask: How many Black people were actually asking to be murdered in horror…
