Shimon Augustine Associate Sports Editor

HIM. It isn’t just a pronoun anymore. It’s a title, a debate, a mindset, and as of September 2025, a film produced by Jordan Peele documenting the horrors of sports culture with a supernatural twist. Even though this film had mixed reviews, I am firmly in the camp that this movie tackles toxic sports culture in a refreshing way. Using horror as their medium and a few (somewhat on the nose) motifs, director Justin Tipping paints a gruesome picture of the “no guts, no glory” mindset of today’s sporting world.

The movie starts with a young Cam Cade who watches his idol, Isaiah White, score a championship-winning touchdown and get violently injured in the process, while his father tells him that real men make sacrifices. The team has its own altar above the TV, a familiar religion in many households. Years later, Cam is a rising quarterback whose career is threatened by a concussion, until Isaiah invites him to train for a week at his isolated desert compound.

The film is centered around this week of training. Each day gets its own title (Fun, Poise, Leadership, Resilience, Vision and Sacrifice) like chapters in a gospel, and each lesson pushes Cam further into Isaiah’s philosophy: winning for the sake of winning, no matter who gets hurt. The training is barely training at all. Players take footballs to the face from a jugs machine, Cam spills his own teammates blood, and he’s constantly injected with a mystery substance he’s told is a booster. It’s hard to watch without thinking of every real athlete who played through a concussion because “that’s what it takes to be a man”.

But what really makes this movie great are the characters. Isaiah is someone so deeply indoctrinated by the sports world that he has a god complex and is willing to literally kill his way to the top. Cam grapples with the reality that to achieve the sports greatness he was conditioned to crave; he would have to give up everything he already is, a son, a boyfriend and a human. The team doctor delivers what might be the film’s thesis in one line: never kill yourself for a job.

The movie has very clear religious undertones as well. Day five’s dinner with the team owners is a not-so-subtle Last Supper, complete with Cam drinking a red liquid that turns out to be Isaiah’s blood, and the satisfying demise of the pig-masked owners in a scene too gruesome to be put in words. But the excess is on brand for sports. As my friend put it, the real horror is the glorification of violence, and Him makes that violence impossible to look away from.

What stuck with me most wasn’t the gore, though. It was the idea that people’s whole lives can be shaped by a sport, and that children are groomed for it before they’re old enough to choose. Cam’s father didn’t just love football; he handed his son over to it. Behind the demons and the rituals is one simple question: what are we willing to sacrifice for a win?

Him won’t be for everyone, and the critics made that clear. But for a horror movie about football, it’s more chilling than most other horror films out there.