HIM lures audiences into the darkest recesses of professional athletics and designs a sinister fantasy version of that world, where the sacrifices required to become the greatest of all time are not just metaphorical but literal.
HIM (2025) is a psychological sports horror film directed by Justin Tipping, co-written with Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, and produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.
“Football happens to be my favourite sport, and the idea of horror set in that world was something that blew my mind from the outset because it seemed difficult to achieve,” Jordan Peele says. “But the screenwriters had done something special. They had taken what I did not realise was creepy about sports and revealed it one notch at a time.”
“It is a perfect Monkeypaw film because of the mischief involved in the idea,” Peele says. “It’s taking something that you are not supposed to touch, something culturally sacred, and figuring out how to cross that boundary in a way that brings everybody along.”
Although set in a twisted version of modern professional football, the film delves into the ancient roots of our 21st century entertainment obsession. In medieval England, as far back as the 9th century, the pre-Lent period known as Shrovetide would feature “mob football” games that would pit one team of men against another in a brutal battle for a ball. “You have to ask yourself, ‘why do we do this?’” Peele says. “Why do we line up people and have them pretend to go to war? Something about seeing the best male specimens fight to the death is a very human sort of horror. And the crazy thing about it is, it’s fun!”
The film taps into other subterranean layers as well. Even the film’s title evokes a sense of meaning and history lying beneath it. For the uninitiated, referring to someone as “Him” is a linguistic evolution of referring to someone as “The Man,” “The Guy,” or more recently, “The G.O.A.T.” (aka The Greatest of All Time). “The term ‘Him’ has become part of the American zeitgeist now,” says producer Win Rosenfeld says. “It is the idea that someone is so transcendent, so undeniable, that we do not even need to use their name. So much of our culture now is centered on heroes, athletes and celebrities, who become that one person, that singular entity that becomes ‘Him.’ But the term has interesting Biblical and mythological allusions, too.” Indeed, HIM is intentionally tugging at the strands of those allusions. “In some ways, football has become a kind of American spirituality.”
Director Justin Tipping saw HIM as a razor-sharp critique of the entire mass-market sports culture and the multiple pounds of flesh we demand from our heroes. “Football is body horror,” Tipping says. “For me, this is a story about what happens when the athlete becomes the commodity and suddenly you are just a warm body being moved around by institutions that are there to drive profit.”
Former college wide receiver Tyriq Withers plays Cameron Cade, a rising-star quarterback who has devoted his life and identity to football. As the professional football league’s annual scouting Combine approaches, Cam is attacked by an unhinged fan and suffers a potentially career-ending brain trauma. Just when all seems lost, Cam receives a lifeline when his hero, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), a legendary eight-time Championship quarterback and cultural megastar, offers to train Cam at Isaiah’s isolated compound that he shares with his celebrity influencer wife, Elsie White (Julia Fox; Uncut Gems, No Sudden Move). But as Cam’s training accelerates, Isaiah’s charisma begins to curdle into something darker, sending his protégé down a disorienting rabbit hole that may cost him more than he ever bargained for.
The film’s path to the screen involved building upon the widely praised initial script by Bronkie and Akers
“Skip and Zack had crafted a very clean-line thriller,” producer Ian Cooper says. When Jordan Peele read it, Cooper says, he immediately saw an opportunity to “get even deeper into the intricacies of some of the more insidious aspects of sports.”
The script’s evolution presented Monkeypaw with the opportunity to work with a director who’d been on the company’s radar for years. Tipping, a Filipino American filmmaker from Oakland, California, had made an independent film in 2016, Kicks, that had left a lasting impression with several people at the company, Peele himself among them.
Tipping’s Kicks “perfectly captured, in a beautiful impressionistic way, the obsession with and culture around sneakers,” Cooper says. “It has so much overlap with contemporary culture—style, sports, fashion, luxury, desire, wish fulfillment.” At the time, Peele had just won an Academy Award® for Get Out, and he invited Tipping over for a meeting at Monkeypaw. “It was a pretty surreal experience,” Tipping says. “We talked about my tiny, tiny movie, and to have your peers, especially someone that talented, curious about your own work—my jaw was on the floor the whole time.”
Over the years, Monkeypaw kept Tipping in mind, looking for the ideal project for him to direct, and found it with HIM. From the opening pages of the script, Tipping says, “I was like, ‘Whoa, I know how to do this.’” At the heart of this story, Tipping says, is football—bone-crunching, brain-rattling, multi-billion-dollar pro football—and the two modern gladiators facing off in a secluded coliseum, with only the gods watching.
The relationship between Cam and Isaiah in the film pushes both men to ever-more-grueling lengths, and their chemistry throughout rides on a knife edge of trust, fear, envy and worship. “Cam idolizes Isaiah,” producer Jamal Watson says, “but of course, if you spend enough time around your heroes, they become human—and then you will try to best them. And over the course of the film, we see that beast awaken inside Cam.”
Tipping’s film explores themes that are primal and ancient—experience versus youth, father versus son, darkness versus light, gods versus men, eternal life versus mortality—but the vibe of the film feels electrifyingly new. “Justin is an incredible visionary,” Peele says. “There is so much striking imagery in HIM that you will never see in another film, and to that, Justin and his team have added all these cinematic layers, from the music to the cinematography to the editing. Above anything else, Justin is cool, and he has this ability to capture that over-the-top polish of pro football, while also allowing this creepy sense of humor to sneak in underneath it. He is a one-of-a-kind filmmaker, and this film is like nothing I have ever seen.”
Justin Tipping is an American director, screenwriter, and executive producer known for blending social realism with stylised genre. He launched his feature career with Kicks (2016), a lyrical coming-of-age film that premiered at Tribeca, and has since directed episodes of Flatbush Misdemeanors, Dear White People, and Joe vs. Carole. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara, Tipping’s cinematic awakening came during a semester in Rome, where Italian cinema reshaped his path. His work often interrogates masculinity, identity, and myth through a visceral lens, culminating in HIM, his psychological sports horror debut for Monkeypaw Productions.
Zack Akers is a writer, director, and producer best known as the co-creator of Limetown, the haunting podcast-turned-TV series that redefined audio fiction. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Akers began his career producing sports documentaries before pivoting to narrative storytelling. With a penchant for eerie mysteries and psychological depth, he co-founded Two-Up Productions with Skip Bronkie, crafting acclaimed projects like 36 Questions and The Wilderness. HIM marks his leap into feature film, continuing his exploration of identity, obsession, and narrative immersion.
Skip Bronkie, also a Tisch alum, brings a hybrid background in tech and storytelling. After working as a creative director at Facebook and Pinterest, he co-founded Two-Up Productions with Akers, where he helped shape Limetown into a global phenomenon. Bronkie’s work spans fiction podcasts, musicals, and political documentaries, all marked by high production values and emotional resonance. He lives in Brooklyn, often found wandering Prospect Park, and remains committed to crafting stories that linger—HIM being his latest cinematic venture.
