By RS Benedict
The critics denounced HIM. The Tomatometer branded HIM a rotten 30%. Wendy Ide of the The Observer sneered that Justin Tipping directed the 2025 football horror film “with the hollow showiness of an advert for trainers.” Andrew Lawrence of The Guardian griped that the Monkeypaw production about a sport in which 300-pound men slam into each other at top speed was “not subtle.”
I am sorry, Wendy Ide of the The Observer, that your steak is too juicy. I am sorry, Andrew Lawrence of the The Guardian, that your lobster is too buttery. Because grotesque sensory extremity is precisely what that makes HIM great. HIM is a bombastic, hallucinatory, testosterone-soaked maximalist horror film about how the NFL is a death cult governed by Satan himself. Which it is.
In structure and aesthetic, HIM unfolds a bit like a macho brother to Dario Argento’s beloved 1977 giallo Suspiria. In both, a naïve young initiate comes to a strange place to study their physical art, only to discover that the academy is run by a sinister coven.
HIM centers on Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a rising football star whose career is derailed by a head injury. Cam kicks around the idea of retiring to preserve his remaining brain matter, but then he gets an invitation to train for a week with aging quarterback and much-lauded GOAT Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) at White’s compound in the desert.
At the compound, Cam is subjected to a series of brutal drills and torturous medical treatments, seduced by Isaiah’s creepy wife Elsie (Julia Fox), and attacked by Isaiah’s cultlike fans (led by a blonde hag named Marjorie, a nod to the Republican ex-Congresswoman who denounced Colin Kaepernick for his anti-racist activism). As the week carries on, the weirdness escalates up to a deliriously violent climax.
There’s a sprinkling of Phantom of the Paradise here too, with the emphasis on Faustian contracts in an entertainment industry that destroys talented young people for money. Phantom’s musical structure reflected the record industry it critiques. Similarly, HIM is shot and edited like a commercial for athletic shoes or sports drinks, the kind that gluts every ad break in every televised football game. Cam’s journey is visualized in quick cuts, dramatic angles and frenetic camera work, with x-rays showing the damage inflicted on human skeletons and internal organs. It’s exhausting and disorienting, like pushing your body to the limit with a head injury would feel.
HIM dives headfirst into blunt Christian imagery. There’s a Last Supper tableau vivant with Cam as Christ-figure. Throughout the film, characters shout prayers and talk about God (often third in line after football and family, respectively). The team Isaiah belongs to (and Cam hopes to join) is called the Saviors, a not-at-all subtle riff on the Saints. It’s over the top, yes, but so is the specter of Christianity in football in real life, where games start with prayers, and fans beseech the Lord for their team’s success, and players thank God for their victories, and the Wall Street Journal publishes weird Ben Sasse editorials about how football “harness[es] wild masculinity and direct[s] it toward the good and pure” via some sort of adolescent testosterone magic ritual.
HIM’s religious motif isn’t in the service of Christian propaganda. It is overwhelmingly the football cultists—not the hero—who scream about God and Jesus. It’s a commentary on the way the NFL wraps itself in grotesque Christian nationalism while doing ludicrously evil shit.
Cam, as a protagonist, is a clueless everyman. As is often the case with horror movies, the villains are much more fun to watch. Tim Heidecker appears as Cam’s hilariously sleazy agent. Julia Fox plays a freakish parody of a white trophy wife, slinking around the compound dressed like some sort of alien concubine, hawking GOOP-ish wellness products like vagina crystals (there is also a version for men, which, she explains, you “put in your butthole”).
But the best performance in the film belongs to Wayans, who radiates menace and loneliness as the fading GOAT, beating his fists bloody against the bars of his gilded cage. Wayans as Isaiah White spends most of the movie torturing Cam under the guise of mentorship, but in between the masculine dominance rituals there are moments of quiet vulnerability. In one scene in particular, as the two men sweat in a sauna, the aging athlete opens up about the decline of his career and body, and how he’ll miss the camaraderie of the locker room, even the smell of it. The exchange brings to mind the feminist joke that men invented contact sports so they’d have an excuse to touch each other.
But despite Wayans’ strong performance, and striking imagery, and a very truthful thesis—that the NFL is a death cult run by Satan—the movie flopped, and critics hated it. Why? Maybe they were expecting another Get Out, something a little more cerebral and subtle and ‘elevated.’ HIM, whose bloody denouement explodes on a football field with a giant demonic sigil while cheerleaders shake pompoms and fighter jets spray red white and blue chemtrails overhead, is very much not that.
Or maybe the movie hit a little too hard.
Multiple times throughout HIM, Wayans’ fading football star compares the game to the gladiatorial matches in the Coliseum. It’s easy to shrug it off as a lazy allusion to a famously violent form of entertainment in a famously decadent Western empire.
But the parallels go deeper than that. For one, gladiator matches were big business. Gladiators’ owners made money on the games. Trainers made money whipping combatants into fighting shape. Successful gladiators could make money, too—Emperor Tiberius offered some retired gladiators 100,000 sesterces each to participate in a show in honor of his grandfather. And there was branded swag. Merchants used celebrity gladiators’ images on consumer goods to help sell products.
But the sponsors of the games were more interested in politics than in profits. It was their civic duty to bring the bloody theater to the masses. Producing a lavish gladiatorial show could help a sponsor drum up votes in an upcoming election, or win favor for his policies. Gladiatorial games might be performed to celebrate a military victory, or to cheer up the public after a defeat.
Consider, as a contemporary echo of this tradition, how NFL games start off with a ritual recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and wrap themselves in stars-and-stripes imagery throughout. Consider how the U.S. Navy’s flight demonstration squadron the Blue Angels flies over football fields. Consider the NFL’s Salute to Service program. Consider Pete Hegseth reciting Bible verses and transphobic slurs at the beginning of the recent match between the Kentucky Wildcats and the Texas A&M Aggies. Consider New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft banning Macklemore from performing with Ed Sheeran at Gillette Stadium after the rapper uttered the words, “Free Palestine!”
Though the gladiators themselves could achieve celebrity status, and could win a good amount of prize money, they were, overwhelmingly, ‘lower’ individuals: slaves, prisoners of war, ethnic or religious minorities. There were gladiator types whose names and attire imitated—or stereotyped—Rome’s defeated enemies, like the Gallus (after the Gauls), the Samnite, or the Thraex (after the Thracians).
Consider, as a parallel, American football teams named after indigenous people: the Kansas City Chiefs, the Central Michigan Chippewas, the Florida State Seminoles, the Utah Utes, the former Washington Redskins (now called the Commanders).
In HIM, Isaiah tells Cam about the origin of the quarterback, and why football is played the way it is now. The game used to be even more violent a hundred years ago, with victories won by brute force. In 1905, eighteen players died playing football in the USA—three of them college athletes, the rest high school kids.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s team knew they couldn’t win with strength alone. More inmates than students at a boarding school designed to brutalize them into assimilation with the philosophy of “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” the Carlisle Indians were true underdogs. They were physically smaller than their wealthy, white, Ivy League opponents. So, the Indians relied on agility and strategy. It worked. In the 1907 season, Carlisle dominated their bigger, beefier rivals using trick plays with then-innovative techniques like the forward pass and the overhead spiral, which Carlisle Indian fullback Pete Hauser was said to have invented. They beat Penn 26-6—Penn’s only loss that season. They trounced Harvard so badly that Crimson fans rioted. They changed the way football was played forever.
In 1918, the US Army closed the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and turned it into a military hospital.
Of the brilliant, innovative team that permanently transformed the game, Isaiah says, “Now they’re mascots.”
American comedian and influencer Drew “Druski” Desbordes isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers with his jokes. In one sketch, he played a megachurch pastor flying over the altar on wires, dressed in loud designer clothes, demanding that his audience shower him with cash. Some Christians got mad. His sketch parodying conservative white women infuriated right-wingers, who accused him of insulting Erika Kirk (though he did not overtly name the famous widow and CEO in the video).
More recently, Druski has drawn the ire of American football fans for his video titled “Athletes get Concussions & LOSE THEIR MINDS.” The sketch depicts a football player getting a serious head injury during a game (in a way that looks awfully similar to Oregon Ducks quarterback Dante Moore's recent run-in with USC Trojans linebacker Desman Stephens II) and then spiraling into increasingly erratic behavior, including domestic violence and a car chase with the police. Some current and former NFL players called the skit insensitive.
Is the sketch a little edgy, a little mean? Maybe. But he’s got a point. A study released earlier this year suggests that at least a quarter of NFL players have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—in other words, brain damage from repeated head injuries. It’s a serious condition that can cause life-ruining problems, including memory loss, aggression, impulsive behavior, interest in suicide, and the gradual loss of control over one’s movements.
Since most football players take up the game in childhood, that means they’re injuring brains that haven’t finished developing. A CDC study published in 2021 found that kids playing tackle football are about 15 times more likely to get hit on the head than kids playing flag football. Add that to even more injuries sustained through four years of high school, then college, and then years playing harder and hitting harder in the professional leagues. It comes out to decades of brain injuries, over and over again.
Helmets can only do so much. A sudden deceleration (like when a huge man running at top speed slams directly into another huge man running at top speed) can cause brain injuries even if the head isn’t impacted. The brain can bump against the inside of the skull when a person going fast suddenly stops; it’s like shaking a sponge around in a jar until the sponge hits the glass. There’s not really a way to make that kind of repeated impact safe. As Jim Jefferies’ weird doctor character quips in HIM, “It turns out that human skulls aren’t designed to smash into each other.”
CTE, which can cause aggressive, impulsive behavior, may be a contributing factor to the NFL’s serious problem with domestic violence. Former player Ryan Clark said on the Pivot Podcast, “Forty-eight percent of the violent physical crimes in the NFL are domestic abuse.” But it’s not just athletes who abuse their partners (and get a slap on the wrist for it, even after the NFL instituted a new Personal Conduct Policy in 2014 in response to Ravens running back Ray Rice getting caught on camera punching his fiancée unconscious in an Atlantic City casino). Coaches and other NFL personnel do it too, and they often get off a lot easier than the athletes do. The violence even extends to the fans; the police receive more domestic violence calls when the local football team loses.
So CTE and domestic violence are problems too serious to depict in a comedy sketch, but not so serious that the NFL has to actually do anything meaningful about them. After all, as announcer Kirk Herbstreit said last week on Thursday Night Football, boos turn into cheers if you can score points, numerous sexaul assault allegations be damned. There’s too much money to be made. The absolute lowest-value NFL teams (which, at the moment, are the Bengals, the Bills, and the Cardinals) are still about eight and a half billion dollars each; the most valuable team, the Dallas Cowboys, is worth $16 billion. What’s a couple of human skulls in comparison?
Robert Daniels of RogerEbert.com, in a scathing review of HIM, wrote that “These ideas were handled far more gracefully in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, which understood how to critique a system while worshipping its results.” It’s a revealing turn of phrase: worshipping its results. Why is a film obligated to worship the results of a system it critiques? Daniels seems to take it for granted that HIM should adore American football and considers it a stylistic or even moral flaw that the film does not.
Maybe the critics and the filmmakers disagree on what the results of American football are. To HIM’s detractors, the primary output of the NFL is the glory of the game. The CTEs and domestic violence are unfortunate side effects. The industry’s greed is unpleasant but nothing to worry about too much. In HIM, the NFL’s real purpose is to mangle men as human sacrifices in exchange for their owners' (and their owners' shitty nepo babies') wealth and power. The sportsmanship is just a happy accident. Why would anyone worship that?
Maybe people hated HIM for the same reason they got mad at Druski’s sketch about CTE in the NFL: it made them confront something uncomfortable about something they love. But unlike Druski’s comedy, HIM doesn’t soften the blow with humor. And while Druski’s sketch is only a couple of minutes long, HIM hammers the point home relentlessly for an hour and a half. You don’t get to laugh it off. You don’t get to walk away from it. You don’t at least get the satisfaction of being patted on the head and told you’re cleverer and better than other people for knowing about it. Instead, the movie rubs your face in it, and your own complicity in it, and that’s not easy to sit through.
Though he is the primary antagonist of HIM, Wayans’ unhinged Isaiah White isn’t really the villain of the story. In the Coliseum, the opposing gladiator is just another slave. The real enemy is the game, the arena, the screaming crowd. It’s us.
RS Benedict has a Master's in linguistics. Their work has appeared in Current Affairs, Fangoria, Blood Knife, the New Haven Independent, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among others. They live in Albany for some reason.