Sports Horror HIM Is Friday Night Lights Meets Nosferatu

Cinema is awash with horror movies, and there have been plenty of sports movies over the years too. But rarely have the two genres mixed – until now. Make way for HIM, the latest film from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions stable, by director and co-writer Justin Tipping – an American football spookfest, in which Tyriq Withers’ juvenile player Cameron Cade gets more than he bargained for under the mentorship of Marlon Wayans’ seasoned quarterback Isaiah White. A sedate commitment to becoming the GOAT looks set to lead to bloody consequences.

For Tipping, the film offered the chance to establish a familiar sporting milieu, before sending the whole thing to hell. “My instinct was to set it up in a way that it feels like we’re in Friday Night Lights, or a Gatorade or Nike ad,” he tells Empire. “We’re rooting for the kid who just needs to unlock one thing to take it to the next level. And then we subvert the expectations and let it become Nosferatu or Ex Machina, and let it evolve or devolve — depending on your sensibilities — into something it’s not.” The psychology of shooting for sporting greatness comes with all kinds of potential pitfalls that Tipping can mine for scares. “Once I started leaning into some of my favourite horror — which would be more in the vein of a Jacob’s Ladder — the creative floodgates just opened,” he says.

For Peele, HIM is exactly the sort of film he created his production company to make. “At Monkeypaw, we love ideas that shouldn’t be made and that we’re not supposed to touch, and the combination of sports and horror was something I had never quite seen,” he says. “It was just clear that we had a genre mash-up that was right up my alley.” Hopefully, in the niche realm of sports horror, it’ll end up being the GOAT.

Read Empire’s full HIM feature in the Avatar: Fire And Ash issue – on sale Thursday 31 July. Order a copy online here. HIM comes to UK cinemas from 3 October.