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Lucky Emory (Deborah Ayorinde) with daughter: New home, old racism
Photo: Amazon
The single-family houses are painted in the very lightest pastel shades, the housewives standing around in their front gardens have hydrogen-blonde hair.
In the US horror series »Them« it seems as if someone has walked through this 1950s home world just outside Los Angeles and washed all the bold colors out of the setting to make it clear: Compton is a white neighborhood.
Compton?
This is the city that has been celebrated as the birthplace of gangsta rap in a number of hip-hop tracks;
a focal point where today almost exclusively Afro-Americans and Hispanics live.
But in the 1950s, the Los Angeles suburb was still a magnet for white office workers and their families, who could celebrate their rise here amidst flickering televisions and smoking barbecues.
Afro-Americans were not part of this post-war middle-class
biotope; white collar
meant
white power
here
.
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Allison Pill as Betty: Careful, Hydrogen Bomb!
Photo: Amazon
The black couple Lucky and Henry Emory (Deborah Ayorinde and Ashley Thomas) also discovered this when they arrived from North Carolina after a long journey.
Henry got a job as an engineer in an aviation company;
in California, he and his wife and two daughters want to leave behind the segregation and racist laws of the southern homeland.
But the purchase contract for the house says: "No neighbors with negro blood".
New home, old racism.
Nightmare in white
The real estate agent waves it away;
Thanks to Californian legislation, one could not complain about the ethnic composition of a neighborhood, their new home is safe for the Emorys.
But the new neighbors look at the Emorys like intruders, hostile they gather in house driveways and on sidewalks.
A nightmare in white.
The »Them« creators use the aesthetic repertoire of the classic horror fairy tale and, as it were, turn it upside down in terms of color: The sunny, color-desaturated setting unfolds a gloomy, hostile impression;
the blond housewives band together like zombies in front of the black family's house.
"Stepford Wives" meets "The Night of the Living Dead" - only that the terror reveals itself in light tones.
Hillbilly witches and hydrogen bombs
White is a nasty color: In its color logic, the series commissioned by Amazon Prime Video (a second season is already planned) is reminiscent of the hit series from another US provider: The HBO production "Lovecraft Country" also took place before the 1950s - Set motifs from the ghost and science fiction films of that era converted into horror stories with black heroines and heroes.
In "Lovecraft Country" they had to fight against Ku Klux Klan cap wearers and vampires - although the fantastic monsters there weren't half as dangerous as real racism.
Behind the HBO series was Jordan Peele, the great Afro-American film and television innovator who had previously made "We", a highly complex horror film about a black nuclear family that is haunted by their own doppelgangers.
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Henry Emory (Ashley Thomas): Alone among whites
Photo: Amazon
Peele's influence is omnipresent in "Them";
individual attitudes even seem to be consciously adopted by "we".
The producer of the new series was Lena Waithe, who set new narrative standards as an actress and author with the comedy series "Master of None" or the queer love drama "Queen & Slim" and has since signed an exclusive contract with Prime Video.
Now she is adding strong facets to the new Afro-American horror stories with »Them« (chief author: Little Marvin).
Terror has two levels here: on the one hand, the Emorys are harassed by their white neighbors, on the other hand by demons they have brought with them from their southern homeland.
What's more scary?
The unreal hillbilly witches and minstrelshow singers who appear to the Emorys at night, or the white hydrogen bombs in the neighborhood (including Allison Pill from "The Newsroom") that threaten a siege ring of lemonade stalls around the first African-American home on the street pull, then become more tangible.
Has the violence that ruled Compton and other black neighborhoods today been sown by the white middle class?
The creators of »Them« create highly ambivalent images to tell about this escalating scenario: When father Emory wants to install a television antenna on the roof of the house, he is attacked by white men and cursed as a monkey, whereupon he lashes out wildly and they Camera imitates the iconic classic film setting in which the giant monkey King Kong defends itself against attackers on the roof of the Empire State Building.
And mother Emory runs out the door once and waves a gun around with the crazy look of a crack addict in front of the white neighbors.
A breathtaking change of perspective: the "white" and the "black" view of racism in the USA are cut against each other in such scenes.
"Them" is therefore unsuitable as a self-empowerment parable: There is nothing heroic in this story about violence and counter-violence.
»Them«:
from now on the original can be called up on Amazon Prime Video.
Probably from July in the synchronized version