If you’ve seen Blue Velvet, David Lynch’s nightmarish noir movie in which Dennis Hopper portrays a man a few milkshakes short of a diner, you’ll know that true horror resides in suburbia.
There’s something inescapably creepy about white picket fences, doo wop music and lawns manicured almost as perfectly as the housewives inside.
Amazon Prime’s spooky new horror anthology series Them arrived last week.
A black family flee the racist Jim Crow-era south to California during what is known as the Great Migration. However, the promised land isn’t waiting for them, instead a small town nightmare awaits.
The neighbours seem friendly but, like a lot of polite society, it’s all a show: aggression lurks behind creepy neighbour Alison Pill’s smiling, alabaster facade.
The Emorys have entered a white world, and not just in terms of race. Even the colours on screen are so washed out Them feels like it’s in black and white.
The campaign of terror eventually leads to an unfortunate end for the Emorys’ family pooch (dogs never survive on-screen horror, do they?) and the mother waving a gun while screaming at her neighbours to leave them alone.
She’s left looking like somehow she’s the crazy one. The first episode of Them is on its own a neat allegory about insidious racism.
Them, Amazon Prime
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