Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Picture: Supplied
By Gillian Schutte
In an age where platforms like Netflix and Prime Video relentlessly churn out romcoms, sitcoms, and glossy narratives of American exceptionalism, a subversive new genre is stealthily gaining ground.
This is the rise of social justice horror, often blended with magical realism or comic book stylings, and it offers a radical departure from the passive consumption of mainstream narratives. Social Justice Horror is a vibrant, insurgent form of filmmaking that transforms traditional white-centric genres into powerful vehicles for Black voices, challenging societal norms and exposing the festering sores of racism and systemic oppression.
From Jordan Peele’s groundbreaking “Get Out” to Boots Riley’s audacious “I'm a Virgo” and Netflix’s electrifying “SUPACELL”, this genre is a rebellious act of cultural reclamation, blending psychological and supernatural horror to deliver unsettling truths.
Prime Video’s double series, “Them,” created by Little Marvin and Lena Waithe, joins this revolutionary movement. It uses horror not just to entertain but to provoke thought and instigate change. By confronting America’s painful past and present, “Them” asserts that this genre is more than mere fright—it’s a clarion call to reckon with the deep-seated issues of racial injustice.
“Them” kicked down the door with its first season, crashing headfirst into the sinister underbelly of 1950s suburban America. Here the Emory family — a Black family making their way westward from North Carolina to the bright promise of Los Angeles — dreams of a better life during the Second Great Migration. They land in East Compton, an all-white neighbourhood. But instead of finding the American Dream, they find themselves knee-deep in a waking nightmare. The streets are lined not just with manicured lawns and white picket fences, but with simmering hatred and insidious supernatural forces, feeding on fear like maggots on flesh.
Henry Emory (Ashley Thomas), a WWII vet, just wants to provide for his family. He’s caught in the crossfire, trying to prove himself at a white-dominated engineering firm where his very existence is treated like a crime. His wife, Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde), can barely hold herself together, haunted by the memory of her murdered son—a sickening act of racist violence back in North Carolina. Their daughters, Ruby Lee (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Gracie Jean (Melody Hurd), are battling their own demons; Ruby, yearning to belong in a world that despises her Blackness, conjures up a white "friend" who feeds her self-loathing, while little Gracie sees visions of a monstrous white teacher, "Miss Vera," lurking in the shadows.
But it’s not just the neighbours—though they’re bad enough, led by Betty Wendell (Alison Pill), the brittle smiling queen of white suburban malice—it’s also the ghosts in the house, the twisted, distorted reflections of America’s soul. Henry is haunted by a grotesque minstrel figure, a manifestation of the racist "Black Coon" stereotype that mocks his every step, ridiculing his attempts to assert his manhood in a world that refuses to see him as a man. Lucky faces off against a sinister figure in a black hat, straight out of some old Southern gothic, reminding her and us that the violence of America's past is never really gone—it’s just wearing a different face.
And as the tension ratchets up to a fever pitch, the Emorys are fighting for their lives on two fronts: against their living, breathing neighbours who will stop at nothing to drive them out, and against the spectral remnants of racial hatred that claw at their sanity and safety. "Them" doesn’t pull its punches—it’s a gut-wrenching, take-no-prisoners exploration of the cyclical nature of racial trauma, showing us that the horrors of the past are alive and kicking, manifesting in every whispered slur and ghostly wail.
Season 2 flips the script but keeps the adrenalin pumping. Now, it’s 1991 in LA—a city on the edge of an eruption—and we meet Dawn Reeves (Deborah Ayorinde), an LAPD officer investigating a series of brutal murders that start to feel way too personal. These aren’t just random acts of violence; they’re signposts pointing right back at her, dragging her through the murky waters of her own hidden past.
Dawn’s tough as nails on the outside, but inside, she’s a mess of repressed trauma and guilt, grappling with an identity caught between the blue of her uniform and the black of her skin. As she digs deeper, what begins as a procedural investigation turns into a nightmarish journey into her subconscious. The ghosts she encounters are not unlike those of the Emory family—spectres of systemic racism, corruption, and the inescapable violence of history. Edmund Gaines (Luke James), a failed actor spiralling into madness, mirrors this disintegration, embodying the collapse of dreams in the face of a society built on broken promises and white lies.
By the time Dawn’s investigation reaches its crescendo, the lines between the real and the unreal have blurred. The cases she’s following are more than mere murders—they’re also manifestations of the hidden violence and festering wounds of the city itself. And just when you think you’ve pieced it all together, there it is—the figure of the minstrel, the same dehumanising spectre that haunted Henry in Season 1, rearing its ugly head again.
Here’s where “Them” gets clever. At first, these two seasons seem like different stories set in different times, but dig a little deeper, and you find they’re speaking the same language. They’re about the scars etched into the DNA of being Black in America, each a fresh slice on the same bleeding wound. Season 1’s monstrous minstrel—the “Black Coon” caricature that laughs at Henry’s attempts to assert himself—returns in Season 2, a spectral boomerang of racist hate, because history’s ghosts never rest easy.
The minstrel's return ties these stories together like a noose, reminding us that these aren’t just ghost stories—they’re American stories. They’re stories about how structural racism, once unleashed, never stops haunting, never stops maiming, never stops murdering. It’s the same horror in new clothes: first it mocks, then it maims, and finally, it murders.
In “Them,” the hauntings are never just about things that go bump in the night. They’re about things that go boom in our psyches—the traumas we inherit, the histories we carry. In Season 1, the Emory family’s tormentors far from being mere spooks are symbolic of the rotten, unburied bones of America’s racist past, still rattling in their graves. Season 2’s apparitions aren’t just figments of Dawn’s imagination; they’re the bloody fingerprints of systemic corruption, spectral echoes of every unhealed wound and every unspoken truth.
At its heart, "Them" is about generational trauma—a poison that seeps into the very marrow of what it means to be Black in America. It’s about how the ghosts of our ancestors’ pain still haunt us, how their scars live in our skin. The series is a brutal, unflinching look at the cycle of internalised self-hatred, of families fracturing under the weight of the world’s hate, of Blackness being twisted into a pathology by the horrors of a racist past and its violent present.
But it’s also about resistance—the refusal to be broken, the fight to carve out a life in the shadow of a history that’s always at your back. The Emorys in Season 1 tried to flee the horrors of the Jim Crow South, only to find new forms of terror in the supposedly progressive West. Dawn, in Season 2, steps into the lion’s den of the LAPD, another Black face in a white system, battling demons both personal and institutional. It’s in these parallel struggles that “Them” finds its true voice, connecting past and present, showing us that the fight against racism is a battle without end.
This is where "Them" flips the script on horror itself. If Black horror is about the terrifying impact of whiteness on the Black psyche, then surely white horror needs to face its own monster in the mirror—the horror of its own submerged hate, buried deep in the darkest corners of the self. White horror would have to be the ultimate self-reckoning, a genre that confronts its own capacity for dehumanisation and brutality, where the nightmare is not the other but the self—the white mind waking up to the realisation that the greatest horror lies within, lurking behind the eyes of every perpetrator of racial hate, waiting for its turn to strike again.
And that’s the real terror that “Them” dares to confront. Beyond entertainment it’s a haunting call to consciousness, a dark reflection of a world where history is never dead—it’s not even past. This is horror that isn’t just looking to scare you. It’s here to wake you up.
* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.