They/Them stabs for the heart, but fails to draw blood

Queer horror is more essential than ever—which makes They/Them‘s fumbles all the more tragic

by Lindsay Lee Wallace

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They/Them, a slasher film set at a queer conversion camp and written and directed by John Logan (Skyfall, Gladiator), could have been a hit. Horror is deeply queer and conversion therapy is deeply horrific—the pieces are all there.

But by failing to effectively characterize its villains and its heroes alike, insensitively botching its premise, and forgoing the crescendo of righteous, gory glory that usually concludes a slasher to end instead with a fizzling call to complacency, They/Them (pronounced “they-slash-them”) fails to live up to the cleverness promised by its title.

Slasher films featuring both overt (Jennifer’s Body, What Keeps You Alive) and implied (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Scream) queerness have been enjoyed by LGBTQ audiences for decades. Marginalized communities have long occupied the liminal space on the knife’s edge of the genre’s double-edged sword (or its scythe, ax, chainsaw, etc.). They’re portrayed monstrously by films that, at the same time, offer a measure of comfort unavailable elsewhere. 

The slasher genre is more than up to the challenge of exploring weighty issues like institutionalized homophobia and transphobia, as well as queer resistance and community. And as recent years have seen an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ legislation, rhetoric, and violence–especially targeting transgender and gender non-conforming young people–queer people seem eager for it to continue doing so.

Logan himself told Variety, “I’ve loved horror movies as long as I can remember, I think because monsters represent ‘the other’ and as [a] gay kid I felt a powerful sense of kinship with those characters who were different, outlawed, or forbidden.” 

So while slasher skeptics might attribute the disappointing lack of depth with which They/Them prods at its sensitive and timely subject matter to its choice of genre, that’s not the issue here. The problem is that it’s simply not a very good movie. 

To be clear, it’s not for lack of trying.

While slasher skeptics might attribute They/Them‘s failure to its genre, the truth is that it’s simply not very good.

Some aspects of the production, like the tense cinematography (Lyn Moncrief) and nostalgic-unsettling set design (Semret Fesseha and Barbee S. Livingston), do reflect care and dedication. And across the board, the film’s actors aspire to make the most of what they’re given. There are moving performances like Quei Tann as Alexandra, a trans woman whose parents have threatened to estrange her from her brother unless she attends the camp, and Anna Lore as Kim, a closeted lesbian who triumphs over self-doubt and internalized homophobia. There is real creep shit from Kevin Bacon as camp director Owen and Darwin Del Fabro as double agent Gabriel. There’s a nonbinary protagonist, Jordan (Theo Germaine), putting a queer spin on the classic Final Girl role. 

But these promising elements ultimately do nothing but sharpen the sting of what They/Them could have been. 

The issues with the film are many, but let’s start with the villains. Almost all of They/Them’s bad guys are implied or stated to be queer themselves and motivated by self-hatred or inherent perversion, perpetuating the stereotype that all homophobes are just closeted gay people—insisting that the call is coming from inside the house rather than, as is almost always the case, the House and the Senate. The only possible exception is Owen, mastermind of the whole nightmare, whose identity isn’t explored at all and whose motivation seems to be a powerful but strangely vague hatred of queerness. How do you make a slasher about conversion therapy and not make straight, cis people the definitive villains? 

The plot of They/Them is driven by its characters’ identities—and for many of them, their identities are the only characterization they get. But few of them undergo any meaningful exploration or evolution, excepting one brief but notable gem of waterside romance between Kim and wry Veronica (Monique Kim). It’s a movie whose heart should be its characters, but none of them feel quite real.  

A queer slasher set at a camp could also at least have the decency to be a little, you know, campy—but They/Them plays it straight, at times bizarrely so. Until the blood really starts to flow, nobody seems all that upset just to be at a conversion camp: The campers stand around blankly in the opening scene. They laugh at Owen’s jokes. Alexandra is spied on and then forcibly relocated to the boys’ cabin, but she’s given barely a moment to react to Owen’s spookily measured transphobic rant before they’re playing tug-of-war, soundtracked by The Avett Brothers. 

Then, suddenly, they kill a fucking dog!

As part of an activity meant to “reinforce masculinity,” Owen orders camper Toby (Austin Crute) to shoot and kill Owen’s elderly dog. Even Crute’s wrenching sobs can’t stop the moment from coming across, narratively, as They/Them demanding with a petulant pout to be taken seriously. For one thing, if you’re going to do something as messed up as kill the dog in your movie (even a slasher), you have to earn it. It needs to feel like a cymbal crash in the symphony of unbearable unease you’ve already created, not a delayed and desperate stab at making elevator music macabre. 

But more importantly, the scene detracts from the plenty-substantial horror of the film’s basic premise. In They/Them, the horror of a dead dog, and later revelations of physical violence, are presented as moments when the audience is meant to understand the “true” stakes of the situation at Whistler Camp… as though constant misgendering; invasive, manipulative, and cruel psychotherapy sessions; withholding all means of contact with the outside world; confiscating medications including a transgender woman’s hormones; and forcing that same woman to sleep in the boys’ cabin, is not sufficiently violent. 

Conversion therapy can involve a wide range of physically violent practices, including torturing people with electric shocks like those administered in the film. But the reality is that conversion therapy methods that consist solely of psychological tactics aimed at convincing a queer person that who they are is wrong and must be changed are also extremely common, as well as horrifying enough all on their own. 

They/Them fails to capture the horror of homophobia and transphobia, either through nuance or brute intensity.

They/Them’s exploration of more physically violent forms of conversion therapy doesn’t come across like an attempt to honor the full weight of a horrific practice–instead, the film lazily leverages them to do the heavy lifting of building plot momentum, producing an end result that smacks of exploitation. This film should not need rusty pitchforks, or a sadist’s Pinterest board, or a room inexplicably full of creepy dolls, or a dead dog. The stakes are already plenty high. 

They/Them’s ending is the final nail in its coffin.

Jordan has the opportunity to kill Owen, but refuses. Owen is quickly killed anyway by the unmasked slasher, a former victim of the camp, who then pitches Jordan on a plan to “cleanse” all the other conversion camps by slaughtering their staff. It’s a tad unrealistic, sure, but both morally and genre-wise her heart is in the right place! Just imagine the lives improved as queer people nationwide are no longer subject to conversion therapy! Imagine the sequels! 

Jordan, though, is scandalized. “You can try to stop me,” they say furiously, although the slasher has indicated no interest in trying to stop them, “but I’m going to go to my friends now. We’re going to leave this place and never look back. And no one is ever going to tell us who we are ever again. Not him. Not you. No one.” 

There are generous interpretations of this narrative decision. Perhaps Jordan is meant to be breaking the cycle of trauma to which the slasher has already become a victim; but they don’t just decline to join the slasher, they treat her with disdain. The film’s choice to frame the traumatized slasher and her abuser as equivalent sours the triumphant note its ending grasps for. If Jordan is meant to be the audience’s avatar in the film, the center of its morals, what does this mean about the film’s message? That you should avert your gaze from others who suffer at the hands of an unjust system, like so many comparatively more privileged queer people do when they lean into whiteness and cis-ness to distance themselves from those capitalism has not yet granted assimilation? That even in a slasher universe, killing hateful torturers is as bad as torturing? 

Ultimately, They/Them fails to capture the very real horror of homophobia and transphobia either through nuance and truth, or through brute intensity. I ask again: How do you make a slasher about conversion therapy and not make straight, cis people the definitive villains? 

I sometimes have an impulse to bite my tongue when a queer movie is bad. I don’t want my words to contribute to any impression studios might get that could lead them to decide “this kind of media” isn’t worth making—that it’s not profitable enough because the only people they think might watch (queers) don’t like it. But by concealing our true feelings about Bad Queer Media, we condescend to both its creators and the community as a whole, and we all but ensure that it will never, ever get better. 

So if you’re a studio executive reading this, let me be loud and clear: I love everything that They/Them could have been. I want you to make more queer slasher films (ideally with pun-based names). I will always have an open heart and, yes, an open wallet, for this holy, unholy union. And if we had queer horror in spades, maybe I wouldn’t mind They/Them’s flaws quite so much. If we had more films like it, maybe we wouldn’t have to hold each rare gift to such a high standard. 

Or maybe we still would. There’s only one way to find out, so keep making them. Keep making them, and—and this is key—make them good.

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