Them: Covenant (by Little Marvin, 2021) – A black family moves to an all-white neighbourhood in L.A, where they begin to face disturbing threats from next door and within their new home.
The year is 1953. A black family, the Emorys, has just moved into an all-white neighbourhood in Los Angeles, in hopes of a fresh start and better life for their young daughters. It takes mere minutes before their dreams shatter. They are soon faced with hostility not just from their prejudiced neighbours, but something otherworldly in their own home.
Them, subtitled Covenant, is bottled-up dread that necessitates warning labels. It is not an easy watch, not by a far mile. The backdrop of blatant racism draws inspiration from an uneasy piece of recent history. During the Great Migration between 1916 and 1970, 6 million African Americans moved out of the rural Southern United States to predominantly white urban cities. Many had faced the same prejudices that the Emorys did – segregation, racist acts of abuse, and open discrimination in the workplace or at school.