‘Them’ isn’t subtle about racism as a horror story

Racism is a horror story.

All by itself – no further trappings needed. “Them,” a new 10-episode horror anthology series streaming April 9 on Amazon Prime, adds plenty anyway. That both enhances the horrific nature of racism for a while as it loads up on supernatural scares and eventually clouds its message. Or messages.

I think. Some of the messages, by the time all 10 episodes are done, are somewhat muddled in the many strands of plot that have piled up along the way. The overarching one, of course, remains that racism is horrible, that it is insidious and that for some people it is an ingrained way of life, no matter which side of the equation you’re on.

Created by Little Marvin with Lena Waithe serving as executive producer, the show follows the Emory family as they move from North Carolina to East Compton in California in the 1950s. It’s part of the Great Migration, we’re told in title cards, when 6 million Black people left the Jim Crow South looking for a better life.

Alison Pill may have the best insincere smile in the business

Certainly, that’s the promise that inspires Henry (Ashley Thomas), an engineer. He lands a good job that affords a nice house in a nice neighborhood, so he and his wife Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde) and their daughters Ruby (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Gracie (Melody Hurd) head west.

It’s all sunshine and suburbs and rotten to the core.

Complicating matters is the tragedy that the Emorys are leaving behind. Treading carefully is a necessity here and throughout – a lot plays out over the course of the 10 episodes. Repeated flashbacks catch viewers up, but it takes a while.

The new neighbors – new white neighbors, as there are almost no other Black families for miles – are all toothy grins and royal waves and they don’t mean a bit of it. Betty Wendell is the most loathsome of the bunch; others are more violently opposed to the Emorys, but Betty seems to enjoy her sense of bigoted entitlement. Alison Pill plays her perfectly. Pill has maybe the best insincere smile in the business, so effective you couldn’t trust her character if she were handing out cookies and lemonade.

The first morning the white women bring lawn chairs and card tables and set up in the street in front of the Emorys house, blaring their transistor radios. It’s a few steps up from microaggression, of which there is also plenty, but hardly as bad as it’ll get.

At work, Henry suffers the fake support of his sniveling weasel of a boss (P.J. Byrne). Ruby makes a strange friend at school, while Gracie stays home with Lucky, a former teacher. Each family member faces resistance at least, unadorned racism at worst.

Created by Little Marvin, the show lacks subtlety. Here’s why that matters

But each also has something else going on, something that is harder to explain yet no less terrifying. “Them,” this season of which is subtitled “Covenant,” does not make explicitly clear what is real and what is imagined. There are nightmares aplenty, but there are also waking nightmares right outside the front door.

Supernatural characters appear from time to time, more frequently as the series progresses and the story grows in intensity. Whether they’re real doesn’t matter – they’re definitely dangerous. And what is fueling them? In some cases tragedy. In all cases it’s the constant belittling and worse, along with the reminder that to their neighbors the Emorys are considered less than. “You don’t belong here” is a rallying cry of white bigotry. Some see it as less of a theoretical stance than a call to action.

Where the series suffers is in its utter lack of subtlety. Well, there’s nothing subtle about the effects of racism, you might think, and that’s true. But many of the white neighbors, or at least the ones we see, aren’t just bigoted. Some are borderline psychotic. Others vault way past that line.

This suggests that perhaps the problem is not in their hearts but in their heads. You can cure it in either place, but the former suggests a choice. The latter suggests an inevitability, a function of mental illness, even. Maybe they’re just unhinged by their hatred. But it’s so over the top it doesn’t play that way. Making the choice to embrace racism is a scarier proposition.

But “Them” definitely taps into the ugly arrogance of racism, of the twisted belief some people have that their ideas are somehow superior to those of others – and by extension, they’re superior, too. It’s absurd, of course, but it’s no less of a problem for that.

There is nothing about this show, despite being set in 1950s suburbia, that isn’t relevant everywhere today.

Which is the scariest part of all.

AMAZON STUDIOS Deborah Ayorinde, from left, Melody Hurd, Shahadi Wright Joseph and Ashley Thomas in a scene from the Amazon Prime series, “Them.”