Sometimes a horror movie doesn’t need buckets of CGI blood, hammy acting, or a half-baked origin story involving ancient curses and goat demons. Sometimes it just needs the simplest premise: a house, a couple, and some little bastards with hoodies and sharp objects. Them (Ils) (2006), directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, is one of those films. It’s lean, mean, and scarier than realizing your phone battery is at 1% in a bad neighborhood. And here’s the kicker—it’s actually good. Really good. In fact, it’s one of those rare horror films that ages like fine wine, except it comes corked with dread and served in a dirty glass.
A Plot That Refuses to Flinch
The setup could not be simpler. French teacher Clémentine (Olivia Bonamy) and her partner Lucas (Michaël Cohen) settle into their idyllic Romanian countryside home, the kind of place that screams “Airbnb with five-star reviews” until night falls. Then all hell breaks loose.
At first, it’s just eerie noises, misplaced objects, a car that seems to move itself. You know, the kind of thing you chalk up to either a ghost or your own clumsiness. But soon, it becomes painfully clear: they’re not alone. A group of faceless intruders begins to torment them, leading to a long, terrifying chase through their house, the forest, and finally into the sewers.
And then comes the gut punch: the killers are not demonic cultists or Eastern European mobsters. They’re children. Yes, children—feral little psychos who murder not out of necessity or ideology but because they were bored. The film has the gall to end with a title card telling you it was “based on real events,” which is French for “sleep well tonight.”
Performances: Fear Without the Ham
Olivia Bonamy carries the film with the kind of raw, unpolished terror that makes you believe she really is running for her life and not just checking her agent’s voicemail between takes. Michaël Cohen, as Lucas, manages to look both protective and helpless, which is a neat trick considering most horror boyfriends are about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
What makes their performances shine is restraint. They don’t monologue about their love or make half-baked plans to “fight back.” They react like real people: panic, confusion, and occasional dumb decisions (because that’s what you would do if someone broke into your house at 2 a.m.).
The Villains: Hoodie-Toting Hooligans
Let’s talk about the killers. Horror movies are stuffed with masked killers: hockey masks, ghost masks, William Shatner masks. Them strips all of that away and gives us kids in cheap hoodies. It’s genius. There’s nothing supernatural, nothing supernatural—just the fact that your worst nightmare is being hunted like a rabbit by a pack of feral preteens.
And the dialogue? Almost nonexistent. These kids don’t cackle, don’t explain themselves, don’t even seem particularly invested in the chase. They’re just playing. And that’s where the dark humor kicks in: the final line, “They wouldn’t play with us,” is so chillingly absurd it almost feels like satire. What kind of world is this, where not joining a game of “murder tag” gets you gutted in a sewer? Answer: ours, apparently.
Atmosphere: Cheap but Effective
The film is proof you don’t need a blockbuster budget to scare the pants off people. Shot in Romania, Them makes use of shadows, creaking wood, and long silences that make you want to scream “turn on a light!” at the screen. There’s no pounding score or cheesy jumpscares. It’s just tension stretched tighter and tighter until it feels like the film is throttling you.
By the time Lucas gets impaled on a shard of glass or Clémentine is chased through the woods, you’re not watching a horror movie anymore—you’re watching a stress test. The humor comes not from jokes, but from that grim recognition: “Yes, this is exactly how I would die too. Screaming, clumsy, and betrayed by bad luck.”
Dark Humor in the Horror
Now, you wouldn’t call Them a comedy. But oh, the black humor is there. For instance:
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The killers being literal children is the darkest punchline imaginable. Imagine “Lord of the Flies,” but instead of reading it in high school, you’re bleeding out in a Romanian ditch.
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The parents of these kids? Nowhere to be found. Probably at PTA meetings, blissfully unaware their little angels are turning the countryside into Home Alone: The Murder Edition.
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Lucas and Clémentine spend the entire movie trying to survive, only for the film to drop the most nihilistic mic-drop of the decade: both of them are dead anyway.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of slipping on a banana peel and then being told the banana peel had a knife.
Why It Works (and Why It’s Better Than Most 2000s Horror)
2006 was a swamp of bad horror movies—Pulse, Stay Alive, The Omen remake, to name a few. All high-concept, all low-quality. Them is the opposite: no gimmicks, no CGI ghosts, no endless exposition about curses. Just primal fear. It’s the closest thing to horror minimalism you can get without filming someone staring at a wall for 90 minutes.
It also dodges the tired “torture porn” trend that Saw and Hostel popularized. Instead of fetishizing gore, it weaponizes silence and shadows. It’s the rare horror movie that understands what Hitchcock preached: the anticipation of violence is scarier than the violence itself.
The Ending: Kids Say the Darndest Things
That final moment is one for the books. The children board a bus, giggling, their backpacks bouncing as if they’ve just finished soccer practice. And then the title card drops: the killers were aged 10–15.
The last words, “They wouldn’t play with us,” stick like a nail in your skull. It’s absurd, horrifying, and—if you’re the kind of sicko who laughs at funerals—darkly hilarious. It reframes the whole film not as a story about monsters, but as a twisted satire on childhood innocence gone rotten. It’s basically the anti-Disney ending.
Final Thoughts: Playtime’s Over
Them (Ils) is a reminder of why French horror got its reputation in the 2000s for being brutal, uncompromising, and oddly artful. It’s a small, sharp film that cuts deeper than its bigger, dumber Hollywood contemporaries. You don’t need CGI werewolves or haunted PlayStations when all it takes to ruin someone’s night is a group of Romanian preteens with too much free time.
It’s not flawless—some might argue it’s too short, too grim, too stripped-down. But that’s what makes it work. It’s horror boiled down to its essence: the feeling that someone is in your house, right now, and they’re not here for tea.
So yes, Them deserves a positive reappraisal. It’s terrifying, efficient, and laced with enough gallows humor to make you chuckle while checking your locks. If you missed it in 2006 because you were too busy watching The Da Vinci Code, do yourself a favor: track it down. Just don’t invite the neighborhood kids to watch.
Final Verdict: Them is 85 minutes of pure dread wrapped in a twisted joke. And the punchline is always the same: play with us, or die trying.
