In the season’s riveting fifth installment (“Luke 8:17”), the riffs come fast and furious. A sequence involving Edmund ringing the doorbell and Dawn answering it deceptively cross-cuts between two separate incidents to make them seem like they’re the same scene when they aren’t, as Jonathan Demme did in The Silence of the Lambs. Edmund’s Raggedy Andy doll talks to him in voice that’s somehow both absurd and incredibly menacing at the same time, the way the neighbor’s dog talks to David Berkowitz in Spike Lee’s overlooked Scorsese-style serial-killer drama Summer of Sam. A supernatural killer who stalks the sleeping, folds children up in their beds, and kills while invisible to everyone but his victims is on the loose, like no less august a slasher than Freddy freaking Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. A murderous asshole beats a man to a pulp in the middle of nowhere as he begs for mercy, then ditches the battered and mutilated body, like something out of Scorsese’s own Casino — a gangster flick, sure, but one that dips deeper into horror than all but a few of the modern master’s movies.
The reason all of this actually works, rather than feeling like someone’s horror Pinterest board, is because creator Little Marvin, director Guillermo Navarro, and writer Tony Saltzman are filtering all this previous work through a sensibility and a story very much of its own. Folding the aesthetics of Demme, Lee, Craven, and Scorsese — the horrors of Buffalo Bill, Son of Sam, Freddy Krueger, and Frank Vincent — into the framework of turn-of-the-‘90s Black Los Angeles culture makes a powerful statement. It’s a way of wresting existing culture into a shape of one’s choosing, which is what the greats do.
I reviewed episode five of Them: The Scare for Decider.
