Review: 'Them' Explores - but Doesn't Excuse or Exorcise - America's Haunted Racist Past

Season One of Amazon Prime Video's Little Marvin-created terror anthology "Them" is a chilling entry into the horror genre that serves quite well as a bookend, or sorts, to Jordan Peele's 2019 film "Us" (and draws some stylistic influences from Peele's 2017 movie "Get Out").

Season One, subtitled "Covenant," follows the Emory family as they endure ten days of racist abuse and supernatural horror after moving to Compton, California, from North Carolina in the year 1958 - part of a massive "Great Migration" that saw six million African American families flee the Jim Crow South for better opportunities elsewhere.

Ghost stories are all about trauma, and this one is follows suit. A hero in a country that refuses to recognize him as such, Henry (Ashley Thomas) is a World War II veteran living through a hard transition back to civilian life. Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde) has endured a horrifying tragedy. Both parents try to keep the horrors they have suffered from spilling over into the lives of their daughters Ruby Lee (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Gracie (Melody Hurd).

But that proves a difficult task when the family move into their new home, which is located in an all-white suburban enclave where racism saturates every aspect of life, from banking to real estate, from the classroom to the office, and from the police department to religion.

The Emorys' new neighbors are united in their hostility, with the blocks alpha housewife, Betty (Alison Pill) being the most energetic and well-organized of the haters. Betty's stated motives are safety and heritage (these excuses are hardly new), but she proves to have deeper, darker demons than mere reflexive racism; what's more, she's growing dissatisfied with her husband, and ever more attracted to the milkman (Ryan Kwanten), who only seems to have eyes for her in turn.

While Lucky endures ranks of staring neighbors and the family weathers ugly racist harassment, things are hardly better at school; Ruby endures a bout of classroom taunting for the crime of answering the teacher's question correctly. (It almost goes without saying that Ruby's the one who ends up being punished for "distracting" the class.) At work, Harold has repeated run-ins with a boss whose micro-aggressions fly thick and fast.

But the horrors don't all lie outside the family's new walls. They've brought the haunting of their past with them, but there's also something right there in the house - a presence, an evil - that starts to manifest in ways that are personal to each of the Emorys.

The series manages to touch on an astonishing array of specific wrongs that America has historically inflicted on Blacks, and to wrap them up in the story's widely-cast net of fears, traumas, terrors, and emotional torments, all of which resonate. (What LGBTQ person hasn't been on the receiving end of pointed, often officially sanctioned, and malicious othering? Who hasn't felt the accumulation of slights, taunts, and infuriating assumptions until they culminate in a need for a good long primal scream?)

The narrative does unravel to some degree as the story's climax approaches, and there's a curious sidetracking of a major character that serves a larger purpose, but does so in an oddball manner. Still, for sustained chills, compelling storytelling, and purely pleasurable production design, this season rivals other recent ambitious television horror fare, including "The Haunting" and some of the best seasons of "American Horror Story." Get ready to gobble these episodes up... and be sure the hand you're holding onto is actually attached to whoever it's supposed to be.

"Them" streams at Amazon Prime starting April 9.