I’m not usually one to declare a moratorium, but after watching director and co-writer Justin Tipping’s “Him” I think horror filmmakers may need to seriously reconsider these “spider web” stories. You know the ones. They’re about an oblivious protagonist or group of protagonists who get invited to the middle of nowhere, hang out in a village or compound full of cultists, willingly hand over their phones for obviously suspicious reasons, and wander around for most of the movie, trying to figure out if anything scary is going on.
Surprise! There’s always something scary going on. Spider web movies are a horror subgenre where the only twist is that you’re watching a horror movie. Which you already knew, because it looked like a spider web the whole time. Only the fly was ever oblivious. The rest of us were twiddling our thumbs the whole time, waiting impatiently for it to catch on.
Come on, Hollywood. We saw the poster. We saw the trailer. It’s entirely possible to build suspense by letting your audience wander a few feet ahead of the heroes, so we know they’re in danger before they do. But if you’re not going to spring any of that danger until the third act you’d be better make sure the first two captivating as hell. And “Him” does not. And for that matter neither did Mark Anthony Green’s “Opus,” another 2025 film which could easily be described as Diet Caffeine-Free “The Menu.”
“Him” stars Tariq Withers (“I Know What You Did Last Summer”) as Cameron Cade, a football prodigy with the potential, we’re told, to be the next Isaiah White. So who is Isaiah White? He’s the quarterback of the fictional NFL team The San Antonio Saviors. He’s also allegedly The Greatest Of All Time, and this GOAT is on the verge of retiring.
Cameron gets attacked by a mystery man in a mascot costume, and his head injury forces him to sit out his big chance to get drafted. Lucky for him — or is it?! — Isaiah White wants to groom him to be his successor. All Cameron has to do is drive to the middle of nowhere, hang out in a compound full of cultists, willingly hand over his cell phone, and wander around for most of the movie, trying to figure out if anything scary is going on.
Isaiah White is played by Marlon Wayans, a great actor who usually isn’t allowed to be a great actor, since most of his biggest successes are goofy, unambitious comedies. But we all know he’s got another “Requiem for a Dream” in him somewhere, and he’s acting like “Him” is it. It’s not. He’s saddled with ridiculous mood swings and a dialogue tree full of obvious red flags. Justin Tipping has given Marlon Wayans free reign to show his stuff, and the movie we get is in no way Wayans’ fault. If the screenplay — credited to Tipping, Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers — were half as clever as it thinks it is, Wayans could have put this over the top.
But instead we have a movie where, functionally, only a couple things happen. Cameron wants to be a quarterback, he has to work with Isaiah to become a quarterback, Isaiah does some scary stuff, and Cameron finds out it was — stick with me here, because it’s gonna blow your mind — actually scary. Theoretically our hero’s brain injury could have led us to suspect the frightening visions and suspicious behavior were all in his head, and that he’s misinterpreting good intentions as evil schemes. But there’s no evidence to support that theory and besides, it’s highly unlikely that a movie marketed in the horror genre is going to reveal that, whoopsie-daisies, nothing about it was frightening.
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Again, there’s nothing terribly wrong with the audience knowing what’s what before the hero does. That’s how genres are formed, by catering to the audience’s specific expectations. But there’s a difference between “knowing what’s what” and knowing everything, and everything plays out almost exactly the way “Him” says it will. It’s all a big build up to something we already knew. It’s like making a movie about the Titanic and pretending that maybe the ship won’t sink, because maybe all the passengers will get saved by a giant friendly octopus. (Okay, bad example: That actually happened.)
Justin Tipping tries to get by on style. He films the violence, on the football field and in life or death struggles, like one of the latter day “Mortal Kombat” games, with x-ray vision revealing detailed skull fractures and other internal injuries. But that just brings up the fact that, although “Him” is a horror movie about professional football, it has very little to say about the violence at the heart of the sport, and the very real dangers of playing it.
It does have something to say about football itself. “Him” tackles the dangers of hero worship and making moral compromises for fame and glory, and generally casts the sport as a bad, bad, thing. The film’s anger is understandable, albeit blunt, but by the final act Tipping seems far more invested in the film’s opaque and baffling mythology than how that mythology relates to anything in the real world. One of the last acts of violence is damn near inexplicable based on everything the movie has told us. Either they cut out the part where they actually set up what happened — and considering how short the movie is, and how much exposition they left in, that’d be an odd choice — or somewhere down the line they got a studio note saying “Make it like [no spoilers, but insert a similar and better movie here]” and they just tacked it on as an afterthought.
“Him” lacks the fascinating characters, the misdirection, the carefully stretched out suspense, and the thoughtfulness that makes a spider web movie work. You learn about as much from the movie as you do from the trailer, and the trailer is free to watch and saves you a lot of time. Kudos to Marlon Wayans for bringing his A-game, but almost everybody else gives this game away.
