Him, Opus, and New Horror's Attempt to Gaslight Us

2025 has been the year of horror. Sinners, Weapons, 28 Years Later, Together, Final Destination: Bloodlines. This year has given us some really innovative and engaging scary movies that I've had the pleasure of watching in theaters. While it has been exciting watching the modern cannon of horror expand over the last decade or so; it also feels like filmmakers are quickly losing their grasp on drawing inspiration from their peers and having something fresh to say. Over the last few months I've seen a couple movies in a similar vein.

To be transparent; I knew at the outset of this post that it would be very reminiscent of my piece reflecting on the execution of The American Society of Magical Negroes vs. American Fiction. But sitting in the theater watching both Opus and Him all I could think about was how they pale in comparison to their temporary horror counterparts. Conceptually, they posit something new and interesting to examine under a horror lense--the cult nature of music "stans" and the predatory nature of football respectively--but realistically, they both end up being cheaper and less thoughtful imitations of other films. While outputs like these are an inevitability in any creative field it does feel at least to me, like this specific occurrence is especially frustrating because of the films' untapped potential.

In an attempt to make this rant as fluent as possible, I'll discuss bits and pieces of both films and then explain why they so insanely missed the mark. I saw Opus in theaters maybe a week or two after it came out. I am probably one of Ayo Edebiri's biggest fans, it is no secret that the hair and makeup team did their big one, and there are a smattering of actors throughout (John Malkovich,Young Manzino, Tony Hale, and Murray Bartlett to name a few) that I really enjoy. Needless to say, I was excited to see the film. The movie looks incredible. The styling and the cinematography create an aesthetically pleasing package that almost makes you think it's doing more than it is--almost. The music is interesting. For those uninitiated, the film follows aspiring writer Ariel (played by Edebiri) and her journey getting invited to a Prince-esque musician and famous recluse, Alfred Moretti's album release weekend (played by Malkovich). The bones of the film are interesting: a fame-obsessed rookie writer who is invited to a weird artist compound where John Malkovich heads a cult of creativity, who wouldn't watch that?

the music did bang

Unfortunately, the movie has less than nothing to say and while not an exact shot for shot recreation certainly draws heavy inspiration from Ari Aster's Midsommar. To be fair, there's a level of similarity between every cult movie--a fish out of water is placed into a space where odd things are customary and are typically either forced to either conform, claw their way out when things go south, or to do some combination of both. With a concept as interesting as it is, you would think the story lends itself easily to it's own clever take on the classic cult tale. Instead the filmmakers decided to be predictable and nonsensical. The cultists eat weird food--not for a cultural or spiritual reason like Midsommar's Harga but just... because? Followers have to ritually shuck oysters in order to hone their creativity in a bright yellow triangular shed that looks eerily familiar... The more I watched the spookier it got--and for all the wrong reasons.

The film spends an hour and a half meandering while attempting to make the audience laugh or cringe with cheap shocks that ultimately do very little to move the narrative forward. Members of the cast are picked off in typical horror movie fashion, and chracters are largely (seemingly) unbothered as the disappearences begin to pile up. Then, the movie spends the last thirty minutes wrapping up plot points that have never been introduced to try to convince the audience we've been watching something different for the last two hours. The story ends with a confrontation scene between Malkovich and Edebiri, years after she emerges the sole survivor of the listening engagement and he has been apprehended and taken to jail. Ariel has since published a book detailing her run-in with the cult and achieved her life long dream of becoming an acclaimed writer.

god her hair looked good though

In their final tete-a-tete, Moretti reveals he's been one step ahead the entire time. It was always apart of the plan for Ariel to escape, to document her experience and publish a best seller. The goal was always to spread the cult's ideology and radicalize more people to subscribe. Ariel, as a hungry young writer, was the perfect messenger to spread the good word--and that's where the film really upset me. There's something interesting to be said about the modern day true-crime-industrial complex, the over saturation of news cycles giving way to the idolization of corrupt figureheads, and the way their ideas are spread. But that's not what the movie was about. It's a clever choice to have Moretti present as a has-been artist, clawing for one last hit record while he enacts revenge on journalists who've wronged him by using them as a vehicle to control his cult's narrative. But that's not what the film does. Not even close.

Him suffers from similar issues, but is considerably worse off overall. The movie follows NFL hopeful Cameron Cade (played by Tyriq Withers) as he struggles to go pro and doesn't really bother doing much else. The film begins with a young Cam watching his favorite team, the San Antonio Saviors, with his family in their living room. As the Saviors score, their star player, Isaiah White, (played by Marlon Wayans) is critically injured in a way announcers are worried will be career ending. We hear Cade's father tell him, "That's how a real man behaves," and "he played for us so we could all win" and a litany of other incredibly on the nose christ-like signifiers of toxic masculinity. The scene culminates in baby Cameron chanting "I'm coming Isaiah! I'm Him!" before we jump cut to an older, more established Cameron taking an interview speaking about the impact his father had on him.

Within the first 15 minutes of the film he suffers a head injury at the hands of some masked figure with a blunt object and has to miss out on qualifiers (??) to join the professional football league. Just when all hope seems lost, and seemingly out of the blue, Cam's manager calls with the news that Thee Isaiah White wants him to come to his private compound to train and potentially fill his position when he retires at the end of the season. Naturally, Cade and his family are over the moon at this opportunity and he agrees with very little fanfare. The next hour and a half are a blur of strange occurances, onscreen banter between our two leads, and a lot of dream sequences that are largely unexplained. Julia Fox shows up for some reason, and overall the visuals and story beats are largely disjointed from whatever the overacrhing narrative is trying to be.

The story wants us to believe that it's a condemnation of toxic masculinity, a commentary on the brutality of the sport, and a story about the racial and systemic power imbalances at play in modern football. Instead it ends up a jumbled mess of jump scares that ~vaguely~ allude to broader concepts, but ultimately leave the audience with more questions than answers.

Early on in the film, Isaiah tells the story of the invention of the forward pass. He explains to Cam how it was created by Native American boys who played white boys in football, and how the Indigenious boys won time and time again because they'd essentially outsmarted their white counterparts. He remarks on how they were innovators in the sport but have since been reduced to mascots."Don't be nobody's mascot." he warns, or something that affect--part of the issue is that of all the topics touched upon in this film, this is one of the more interesting ones. One of the concepts that hones in on what I assume the director thought he was making a movie about; the way football is quick to consume Black (and Brown) bodies. The people who developed the strategies the game was built on, and overwhelmingly excell at it are still treated as second class citizens. These ideas never fully come to fruition.

Both of these films unfortunately wilt in the shadows of the movies they clearly hold as muses. The cult antics present in Opus pale in comparison to those present in Midsommar. The belivability of Ayo and her crew of journalists buying into the merit of having personal groomers shave their pubes vs. Dani, Christian, and all his friends buying into the Harga euthanizing their elders after a certain age is night and day. The kills also lack any meaning. Is it unexpected and fun to stuff an influencer in the throes of anaphylaxis into a beanbag? Sure, maybe for somebody--but it means nothing narratively. Especially in comparison to the cult film where each death is marked by each character's flaws. Josh's greed (for knowledge), Mark's ego (and carelessness), and Christian's mistreatment of Dani all culminate in their demise in a satisfying way.

even this shot of all the corpses is full of story. just an incredible film.

Similarly, the bread crumbing to the twist in Him isn't much of a trail at all--especially the racial elements the film attempts to address. The eeriness of Chris' interactions with Rose's family in Get Out work so well because they're grounded in reality. I can't count on one hand the amount of white people that have said some variation of, "I would've voted for Obama a third time" to my face in the last year alone. In Him, the racial aspect feels like a secondary thought throughout until the director decides during the climax it's meant to be the thesis. The fever dream sequence of greedy white execs forcing Cam to participate in unsavory acts during their party feels out of place, so much so that by the time they're performing the ritual in the last scene I felt like I was watching a completely different movie. I remember it felt laughable that the film expected me to take anything that happened in the finale seriously, or to feel like Withers' character reached any level of empowerment or self-fulfillment.

My biggest qualm with both films is the fact that two, young, talented Black actors are at the helm and it feels as though, one way or another, the movies are devoid of Blackness. It is a common trope that Black people deal with scary shit differently, and it's one I have to say is overwhelmingly true. We are just too smart to fall for most of that. I'm less upset about Opus in this regard, it was written and directed by a Black man, but I do believe Ayo's Ariel sticks around far too long before she starts questioning the strange happenings on the compund. Him was infuriating with this, and it does have someone non-Black at the helm in a way that is Noticiable. I've seen Tyriq Withers in a few other things, and think he's a solid actor--even if his choice of projects aren't always my favorite--but the director had him behaving like a robot for 80% of this. People die in front of him, he gets a gun pulled on him, he sees Marlon Wayans engaging in recreational blood transfusions and it's rare we get more than a "Woah. What?" from him. It got to the point where I assumed he was cool with all the cult stuff by the end of the movie. Nothing was scary or tense during the horror sequences because our audience proxy was unaffected.

and it bums me out because you can tell they had such a good time filming this

I don't mean to dunk on these two films endlessly. I recognize that there are actors and creatives involved in both that I respect heavily and I understand that it is huge for newer directors to get these more experimental films green lit. But I think, especially in the wake of interesting social and arthouse horror like Get Out and Midsommar respectively, it's kind of absurd to cast up and coming Black actors and not only fail to utilize it to tell your story but to ignore it completely. It's upsetting because not only were the plots of both movies incoherent, they were nonsensical. And I guess it isn't illegal to create a poor piece of art, obviously all creative endeavors are subjective and I am someone who holds the belief that bad work is an important piece of the art ecosystem. It just bugs me, as someone who aspires to create in the future, when someone has access---to the financial backing, the talent, the platform---and they squander it on thoughtless art. Especially when the bones of both movies illicit so much intrigue, ideas that good were never meant to turn into duds.

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Thank you for reading! This is certainly not my most polished post but felt a little too impersonal for Substack. If you'd like to check out more of my writing my most recent post over there details the emotional rabbit hole that consumed me after finishing HBO's Girls. Give it a read!