This article contains spoilers for “Him.”
The GOAT. Sacrifice. Father time is undefeated. These are the sorts of phrases and adages that you’ll be well-acquainted with if you spend much time at all in the sports world, either as a fan or an athlete. The modern media supercomplex in particular has distilled a sort of ESPN-approved, Twitter-friendly shorthand language that’s come to dominate sports “discourse” on TV and online. And in “Him,” the new football-centric horror movie from director Justin Tipping and producer Jordan Peele, a lot of that specific language is twisted in dark and clever ways, turning the way in which we all discuss sports into a piece of the horror conspiracy.
No guts, no glory, right? Only, in the case of “Him,” we’re talking about actual guts — the spilling of blood, the conducting of violence. It’s a phrase we hear in the very first scene of the movie, as a young Cameron Cade (played as an adult by Tyriq Withers) watches his idol, San Antonio Saviors star quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), suffer a major injury on the field. When a grown Cam goes to Isaiah’s massive compound to train as the franchise’s next likely star, “guts” becomes the name of the game, with brutal, concussion-inducing practice routines and a murderous attack from a group of rabid fans that leaves a woman dead.
The truly sinister twists on these common sports phrases become clear in the film’s final act, though, as the nature of the blood transfusions and other cultish procedures at Isaiah’s compound becomes more clear.
There’s cultish imagery throughout “Him” — alchemical symbols scrawled on the walls of Isaiah’s compound, Masonic references around both the Saviors and other teams, and of course, all those weird costumes, seen at points throughout but mainly in the final scene where the team’s owners try to coerce Cam into signing a sort of blood oath contract.
Those costumes use the common satanic imagery of hairy, horned creatures. You know, goats? The animal associated with the devil for centuries? The metaphor gets even more on-the-nose in Cam’s final, brutal showdown with Isaiah, where it’s revealed that the blood he’s been injecting into his body throughout his time at the compound — Isaiah’s highly oxygenated blood — has been passed down through generations of “chosen one” quarterbacks. Isaiah’s reference to these men all becoming “beasts” is another example of a common colloquial sports term, and it begs the question: Where did this blood first come from? Are the Saviors quarterbacks actually injecting diluted blood of some actual devil into their veins, in order to become, in more ways than one, the GOAT?
After defeating Isaiah and realizing that their agent Tom (Tim Heidecker) was in on the cult from the start, Cam opts to go beast mode on the Saviors organization instead, picking them apart in a gory finale that seems to confirm that there is, at the very least, something truly supernatural happening beyond just the cult rituals. We see Tom pulled by an invisible force to a sacrificial pentagram, where he is presumably killed off screen (given the sound effects in the final shot).
“Real men sacrifice” is another phrase echoed throughout “Him.” As the true nature of the cult unravels, “sacrifice” takes on a different meaning in the literal sense. At the party where he meets the owner of the Saviors, Cam discovers that Isaiah’s doctor (Jim Jefferies) has been sacrificed and decapitated as part of the cult’s ritual around signing a new quarterback. Then, in the final scene, we get a bit more context for what happened to Cam’s father.
Tom tells Cam that he’s been “groomed” to be the Saviors’ new quarterback for years. It makes sense that Tom represents both Isaiah and Cam, since he’s part of the cult and therefore must be involved with many of the team’s dark dealings. The bigger surprise comes when he implies that Cam’s father’s death — an event we get very little explanation for throughout the movie — was no accident. In an earlier scene, Cam confesses that in his last conversation with his father, he said he was done playing football. The suggestion seems to be either that his dad was killed by the cult to guilt Cam into staying in the game, or that Cam’s dad sacrificed himself willingly in some ritual meant to secure his son’s future.
Given his dad’s zealous loyalty to the Saviors, and the fact that he’s the character who first delivers the “real men sacrifice” line, the second seems very feasible, but the abject evil of the organization makes either option quite likely. Regardless, the sacrifice in question surely wasn’t the one Cam expected he’d have to make.
“Him” is now playing in theaters.