Dear Watchers,Football season may be over, but horror season continues all year long. On this Genre Movie Wednesday, we’re looking at a football movie that aims not to fumble its creepy premise. And we’re pairing it with a little psychosexual A.I. thriller that just might exacerbate any tech fears you have. Our expert in the horror genre, Erik Piepenburg, writes below about what makes each of these movies so eerily effective. Read his thoughts, then check out even more of his horror picks here. Happy Watching. ‘HIM’
Where to watch: Stream “HIM” on Peacock. I’m in the minority when it comes to this critically pooh-poohed horror-sports crossover from Justin Tipping. I don’t care. As much as my eyes rolled at the film’s silly excesses, I was swept up by its maximalist and subversively funny take on malignant masculinity and the poisons of professional football. The film follows Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), the young hotshot quarterback of the fictional Saviors, as he trains, sometimes brutally, at a desert enclave with the team’s champ quarterback, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Cam is there while the team’s owners decide whether it’s time for Isaiah to let younger blood take the reins. I do mean blood: Cam is haunted by violent hallucinations that make him question exactly what he’s training for and what Isaiah and his companions want from him. Cam meets a monkey-man creature in a sombrero and a deranged demon-fan named Marjorie (a fantastic Naomi Grossman) — all before the film’s epic finale, which positions America as a bloodthirsty colosseum where Black athletes are meat for rich white lions. Withers mostly underplays his role, a good thing since almost everyone else in the film was directed otherwise, especially Wayans. But muscular immodesty is what makes this dark Faustian farce work. If you accept that what you’re watching is a sinister cartoon, you’ll appreciate it for the perceptive freak show it is. ‘Raptus’
Where to watch: Stream “Raptus” on Hoopla; rent or buy it on major platforms. It’s been 10 months since Sarah (Ksenia Solo) was brutally assaulted in a park, leaving her terrified to leave home. Per her therapist’s advice, Sarah begins an experimental therapy in which she lives with an eerily humanlike android (Nolan Gerard Funk, excellent) with a looksmaxxer’s body and Ken-blond hair. Sarah calibrates Raptus, as her robot’s model is called, to be a dream. He cleans, shuts up and purrs to her, “I’d rather die than displease you.” But this latest oddity from the writer-director Bennet De Brabandere is no A.I. meet-cute, no “Making Mr. Right.” It is far more lurid and darkly funny than that, a horror-science-fiction purée of “M3gan,” “Deadly Friend” and other cautionary tales about man-made techno-monsters. When Sarah and Raptus begin a fated romance, the film’s sexual politics might strike some as cringe. But that’s part of what makes the film so hard to define, and a thrill to watch. De Brabandere, the director of the twisted evil kid horror-comedy “Ankle Biters,” takes Sarah’s traumas seriously, and also hardly at all — a delirious, uncomfortable back-and-forth that recalls the unearthly soapiness of “Malignant.”
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