The second instalment of Little Marvin’s anthology series Them: The Scare (2024) takes us to 1992 Compton (California), a moment in history when simmering racial tensions in the US where about to reach a boiling point following the acquittal of four white police officers involved in Rodney King’s brutal assault. This new season follows two intertwined plotlines that will end up intersecting towards the end of the show: on the one hand, African American LAPD Detective Dawn Reeve is investigating a series of bizarre murders connected to a mysterious supernatural entity. On the other hand, hapless Edmund Gaines is a Black struggling actor trying to make it as a thespian while facing a profound sense of alienation and emotional adrift.
This paper understands Them: The Scare to be an exploration into the repercussions that racial boundaries erected in the United States around non-white people, particularly African Americans, inflict upon their minds and bodies. Through its portrayal of racial power’s inescapable fangs, the series conveys the suffocating confinement experienced by its lead characters as they navigate a lopsided system that hinges on the maintenance of white hegemonic dominance. The paper will draw on crucial aspects from the interdisciplinary academic field of Critical Race Theory; namely, on the notion of counter-storytelling, defined by Solórzano & Yosso, that privileges the lived experiences of those afflicted by racism, and also on the notion of racism being not aberrational, but ordinary, an endemic feature of American society, deeply rooted in its institutions and structures, as purported by Delgado & Stefanic. It will also be contended that Little Marvin’s Them: The Scare uses Black horror, a subgenre theorised in detail by author Robin R. Means Coleman, as a vehicle to challenge dominant cultural narratives that have traditionally relegated Black voices to the periphery, and also to juxtapose supernatural horror tropes with real-life terrors plaguing the lives of Black Americans.
