'Them: The Scare' Episode 5 recap: "Luke 8:17" (2024)

Horror is a genre in constant conversation with itself. Presented with the challenge of scaring the audience — as uniquely utilitarian a task in its own way as producing laughter with comedy or arousal with erotica and p*rnography — filmmakers will naturally turn to the things that scared them. This process of borrowing, recycling, and refining is as integral to horror as sampling is to hip-hop.

Are there cases in both genres where an artist coasts by ripping off rather than reinterpreting the source material? Absolutely, from Stranger Things to Sean Combs. But more often, the exchange between past and present is a fruitful one. Them: The Scare has already played with the grainy VHS aesthetic of Ringu and The Blair Witch Project via the home video recordings made by the killer’s two young Korean-American victims, and with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s signature shot, a scorching sunlit silhouette of a howling madman, during Edmund’s post-“audition” freakout, just to name a couple of examples.

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.

There’s a lot else to recommend this episode as well. Pam Grier’s performance as Dawn’s mom Athena is borderline revelatory; if you’ve ever seen your own mom get really sad about messing something up, you’ve seen this woman. (“It’s coming for me and my family, and I’m going to pay for what I did,” she tells her pastor; that doesn’t sound good.)

The revelation that Edmund’s storyline predates Dawn’s by two years is exposed when he shows up at her house, meets her still-husband, and sees her looking absolutely resplendent in her 1989 finery. (I’d feel dishonest if I didn’t admit that the outfits and hairstyles they’ve been putting the truly stunning Deborah Ayorinde in are very unfair to those of us who went through puberty during the George H.W. Bush administration.)

Besides being scary, the scene in which Edmund infiltrates the younger Dawn’s home also helps explain why Dawn divorced her son’s dad. He’s a nice guy, handsome and caring and obviously proud of his beautiful wife and her important job. At the same time, however, he repeatedly ignores or downplays her entirely on-point instincts regarding Edmund, to which she reacts with what is clearly resentment built up over some time and repeated practice. It’s not easy to do character work that deftly in the context of a confrontation with a man who murdered someone several hours earlier.

So we’re left with these revelations: Edmund and Dawn are brother and sister. Edmund is fashioning himself into a Raggedy Andy–style serial killer. And whoever or whatever is killing these people, it can and will do so right before Dawn’s eyes.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York Times, andanyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.