The horror genre is full of tropes designed to scare you, which have been used for decades to scare audiences. The fear of jumping, the face in the bathroom mirror, the chase scene – should I continue? It seems that there is nothing left to frighten us, that everything has been done hundreds of times. That is, until a movie dared to invoke the most terrifying thing: the self-empowerment anthem.
They/Them (or “They Slash Them”) is the new slasher film released Friday on Peacock, billed as “an LGBTQIA+ empowerment story set in a conversion camp.” It’s trying to bring some originality back to mainstream horror. In addition to some big names like Kevin Bacon, to lend credibility to itself and attract a wider audience, it has a whole bunch of queer actors, a big step for a film produced by a major studio.
Its conversion camp setting is certainly one that can hold a huge amount of horror movie power; Conversion camps are very real, gruesome places where fanatical, ignorant families send children to torture them mentally and sometimes physically until they are so broken that they “straighten up.” To set a slasher here, letting a killer loose on a camp counselor can be a stroke of genius if done correctly.
It’s unfortunate, then, that all of that potential is ruined by paper-thin characters, nonsensical writing, and a true misunderstanding of the real horrors that lie inside those camp gates. Even its masked killer doesn’t give a shiver. The real fear in They/Them is found in its brilliant screenplay, one scene in particular that I will never be able to shake. The only thing scarier than a conversion camp, where your fellow campers P! Let NK singalong begin.
During a poignant scene in the middle of the film, two campers, Jordan (Theo Germain) and Alexandra (Qi Tan), are openly discussing the hardships of young trans people and their experiences living after coming out. The scene is legitimately poignant, and left me thinking for a moment that he/she was going in for some worthy takeaways. And then, to my jaw-dropping shock, Alexandra drinks Jordan! Started singing NK’s “Sala’ Perfect”. Moments later, other campers join in one by one to make it a complete musical number.
Oh, how nave we were that we thought the glee was gone and buried. The undead always come back for one last fear.
In case you didn’t know, “Fuckin’ Perfect” is a barrel-of-the-barrel self-empowerment anthem specially crafted by P!NK as a dastardly, chorus-heavy earworm. It’s barren , platitudinal lyrics (“Change the voice in your head / Make them like you”) and banal messaging. An insidious attempt at connection.
I’ve spent a third of my life trying to avoid this song, dodging it on bad Pride playlists and Midwestern radio stations when I go home to visit my parents. So let’s face it in They/Them, when I had nowhere to run after letting my guard down to watch an emotional moment from the movie, it was like joining a horror movie of my own.
There is a special kind of chill that my body gets when I am experiencing unbearable secondhand embarrassment. They usually pop up in a movie theater when a trailer arrives that’s so incredibly stupid—or, on the other hand, so gorgeous it should be but completely misses the mark (Avatar 2!)—that My body can’t help but form a physical response to trying to alert me to go into fight or flight mode. Seeing this scene I was feeling cold from head to toe. I practically passed out when a camper P! Climbed into bed to perform NK’s pseudo-rap poem.
I had to watch it several times to write the piece you are reading now, a task that seemed almost unbearable. I kept my Peacock subscription running for another month before the final episode of Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip Season 2, so that I can access them once again on the day of its release to write an accurate article—Journalism Is Not Dead, friends.
This scene is what some phobia practitioners might call immersion therapy, except I’ll be covered in a tank of snakes. And I hate snakes.
Even more shocking, it’s directed and written by John Logan, who not only has written great movies like Skyfall and The Aviator, but is also openly gay himself. “I love that song, I love P!NK,” he told Coming Soon. “I wrote [the script] for the stage version of Moulin Rouge, where we used P!NK, so P!NK was all in my head.” That, my friends, is what we call gay fever dreams. We all fall asleep listening to Britney Spears or Toni Braxton, but the chaos they create in our subconscious has no place on screen, at least it doesn’t.