by Austen Terry, Contributing Writer
Blumhouse Productions has created some of the best and worst movies in the horror genre over the last few years. With great movies like The Black Phone, Freaky, and Get Out, and with bad ones like Firestarter, Fantasy Island, and Halloween Kills, Blumhouse is all over the place with where their quality can fall. One day while scrolling through Twitter, I saw a poster for their newest slasher film They/Them (pronounced They Slash Them). I was immediately intrigued and skeptical about where this movie would go, and whether it would fall in with the good or bad Blumhouse entries. Primarily in horror movies, LGBTQ+ characters have been just background characters or stereotypes of who they are representing. Upon further research, I discovered that this film had cast actors who were amongst the community and primarily represented the characters they were portraying. They/Them takes place entirely in a gay conversion camp, and that’s where I immediately took caution, as I would just rather be called a slur than to have forced ideals queerbaiting me into thinking this movie was for me. Well, the question remains — would this movie fall in line with some of my favorite Blumhouse movies, fall to the middle of the pack, or fall flat altogether being a fail?
They/Them tells the story of a group of LGBTQ+ young adults who (after being forced by their parents) arrive at a gay conversion camp operated by Owen Whistler (Kevin Bacon), Cora (Carrie Preston), Molly (Anna Chlumsky), Sarah (Hayley Griffith), and Zane (Boone Platt). There are a number of young adults in attendance, but the story primarily focuses on Jordan (Theo Germaine), Alexandra (Quei Tann), Toby (Austin Crute), Kim (Anna Lore), Veronica (Monique Kim), Stu (Cooper Koch), and Gabriel (Darwin del Fabro). They are all immediately suspicious of all the counselors because they seem welcoming and accepting of them, when all the while a killer is lurking in the background.
They/Them’s story does fall flat; it toes the line of the true horror it is to be forced to go to a gay conversion camp. The fact that these camps haven’t been completely made illegal not only baffles me, but enrages me. This story has its twists and turns, but not in the way it should have been, which leaves this film missing out on that one element that could’ve made it great.
This film is the directorial debut of writer John Logan, who has written screenplay’s for some great directors, such as Sam Mendes (Skyfall and Spectre), Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Alien: Covenant), Martin Scorsese (Hugo, The Aviator), and Tim Burton (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street). With these screenplays, you would think They/Them would be the start of the next great slasher in the likes of Friday the 13th, or Scream. What had the film falling flat was that it wasn’t intense enough with the stories I have heard of gay conversion camps and how bad they truly are. With a number of background characters who don’t even have lines, the gore and body count should have skyrocketed. This film could have shown the true horrors of the plague conversion therapy, and could have been the toxic shock most of us needed to finally step up and fight for the end of these camps and such practices. At first, it feels like it might do that, but it quickly falls into the same horror tropes and formulaic plot points that ensure when the killer is revealed, you’re not really surprised.
The actors are phenomenal though — Bacon and Preston are absolutely terrifying in most of their scenes. You will hate them, and rightfully so. You are supposed to. Griffith and Platt are then forced to try and step up their game to compete with which counselor character will you hate more, but they end up falling flat into predator and bully territory. The young adult actors truly shine, with Germaine and Tann who are both at different stages of their transitions, Lore and Kim struggling with accepting who they are, Koch just trying to find his place in this world as a gay man, and Crute just being his authentic self. Having actors who are nonbinary, trans, bisexual, and gay give such a higher level of representation because they have all more than likely gone through something similar to what their characters are going through, and can relate to that given a better performance. You can feel their emotions, especially when things start to hit the fan. They have a musical dance number to Pink’s song “F**kin’ Perfect” that is cheesy, but it works for them to bond.
I went into this movie not really looking for jump scares (and there aren’t many of those), but looking for a bloodbath akin to the slashers before it. You keep guessing who the masked killer is, but the film leaves you wondering why a masked killer was needed. I don’t want to spoil the movie at all, but I wish Logan would have taken a darker tone and had Bacon and Preston be even more terrifying. He barely breaks the ice with what this could’ve been, showing the true torture that gay people are put through in conversion camps that leave lasting scars and emotional damage. The film has its moments, but it leaves you wanting more and wishing the masked killer wasn’t shown so early. We get pictures of past tortures and a short scene that made me uneasy.
The only positive is I loved the characters who were forced to be there and wanted them to survive. Truly I was hoping that Logan would turn the final girl trope on its head, leaving us with a broken final person standing in the aftermath of the carnage. But instead, he left us with something completely different that left the movie between a fallen flat fail and middle-of-the-road slasher.
They/Them is a Peacock original streaming on their platform, and it might be worth checking out, but it is mostly a negative for me. It could’ve been really good, but it just barely scraped the surface of what it could be.
Score: 4/10
You can follow Austen Terry on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd