How HIM’s Brutal Football Training Sheds Light on Real Athletes’ Body Torture
Marlon Wayans and Tyriq Withers take NFL-style training to scary extremes.
Pro football is celebrated as America's favorite pastime, but it also has a very dark side.
In Jordan Peele’s new football-horror flick, HIM, there’s a “recovery room” in Marlon Wayans’ character Isaiah’s training compound that has a symbol on the door: The Philosopher’s Stone. In ancient alchemy, the mythical substance was believed to grant immortality to those who consumed it. But in HIM, the symbol hints at something darker—a torturous deal with the devil that Isaiah made to become a superstar quarterback.
In real life, top athletes often undergo grueling training processes that can feel like near torture. HIM takes those sinister undertones and runs with them, showing just how intense—or creepy—elite training can be when in the hands of a capable storyteller like Director Justin Tipping.
Tipping co-wrote the screenplay with Skip Bronkie and Zach Akers, and Peele (Get Out) praised the team for doing “something special.” He said in a statement, “They have taken what I did not realize was creepy about sports and revealed it one notch at a time.”
From hyperbaric chambers to prolonged ice baths, the training and post-practice sequences provide some of the most surreal, hallucinatory, and shocking moments in the film.
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The real-world training methods explored in HIM
During a particularly brutal and memorable scene, a Jugs machine turned into the stuff of nightmares.
The common training device is a pitching machine designed to rapidly launch footballs. Used by NFL and college players to perfect spirals, passes, and kickoffs, the machine delivered one of the goriest scenes in the film. Every time Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) didn’t throw fast enough, or a teammate messed up a drill, a football whipped into the face of a rookie player until he was bloody, swollen, and slumped on the ground, half dead.
The film also pulled out tension from smaller moments, such as long soaks in an ice bath. Cold plunging has become a near ritual for athletes, who use icy dips to reduce inflammation and soothe muscles after intense workouts. HIM pushes the line, however, showing Cameron completely submerged for several beats too long, a risky practice designed to make viewers squirm.
Tipping gives every last ailment a stylized edge, even when portraying the common concussion. When players knock skulls in HIM, the image on screen flashes and fractures, and we “see” the player’s brain rattle around his head, thanks to thermal footage enhanced with VFX.
Receiving strange injections from a doping doctor (Jim Jefferies) treads familiar territory (Icarus, Screwball). In HIM, Cameron even injects himself at a pivotal life-or-death moment with a syringe labeled “run.” The same goes for sweltering saunas that threaten to cook you alive (the horror film 247 Degrees F comes to mind).
But the sheer creepiness of a hyperbaric oxygen chamber on the big screen is something new. After witnessing some unsettling events at the compound, Cameron is confined inside a pressurized chamber, receiving pure oxygen that, for real athletes, promotes healing of soft tissue injuries. Spoiler: The chamber doesn’t rupture, and Cameron doesn’t explode, but the vaguely menacing overtones were perhaps even scarier.
HIM from Universal Pictures is now in theaters. To get tickets, go to the official HIM website.
Want more from Jordan Peele? His first three movies—Get Out, Us, and Nope—are all available from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment!
(SYFY Wire and Universal Pictures are both part of the NBCUniversal family)
