Stephen King has spent decades terrifying audiences with haunted houses, monsters, supernatural forces, and the darker sides of human nature. That makes his praise for a horror series especially notable. When a writer with more than 70 novels to his name says a show genuinely scared him, horror fans have reason to pay attention.
That is exactly what happened with Prime Video’s Them, Little Marvin’s two-season horror anthology. Before Them: Covenant premiered in 2021, King praised its opening episode, saying it “scared the hell out of me” and admitting that he is difficult to frighten.
Across its two standalone seasons, Them mixes supernatural horror with stories about systemic racism, generational trauma, discrimination, and abuses of power. The result is a series that builds its fear around both the supernatural and the very real cruelty experienced by its characters.
Them: Covenant Makes Racism Part of the Horror
The anthology begins with Them: Covenant, a 10-episode story set in 1950s Los Angeles.
The Emory family, Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde), Henry (Ashley Thomas), Ruby (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and Grace (Melody Hurd), move into a predominantly white neighborhood hoping to start a peaceful new life. Instead, they quickly find themselves surrounded by hostility.
Their neighbors target the family while supernatural forces begin threatening them inside their new home. The premise initially resembles familiar haunted-house stories such as Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror, but Them uses those conventions to examine a more grounded and recognizable kind of terror: systemic racism and the psychological damage caused by discrimination.
Even the title reflects the divide between the Emorys and the people around them. They are treated as outsiders, and that perception develops into everyday hostility and eventually extreme cruelty.
The supernatural elements deepen that conflict. The entities haunting the family can be understood as extensions of the real-world threats surrounding them, making it increasingly difficult to separate supernatural terror from psychological trauma.
As the Emorys become more trapped by their circumstances, the series creates an atmosphere of exhaustion, fear, and helplessness. The horror comes from the sense that there is nowhere the family can truly escape.
Released in 2021, Them arrived during a period when horror films and television were increasingly confronting racism, following works such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out. But the series takes its own approach, combining the consequences of discrimination and generational trauma with disturbing supernatural imagery.
The result is frightening, but also emotionally punishing.
Season 2 Shifts From Haunted House to Detective Horror
Them: The Scare tells an entirely new story while retaining the anthology’s interest in oppression, trauma, and abuse of power.
Deborah Ayorinde returns in a different role, playing Dawn, an LAPD detective investigating a supernatural serial killer. At the same time, she works to protect her community from unfair and discriminatory policing.
Her investigation intersects with Edmund (Luke James), an aspiring actor whose commitment to method acting becomes increasingly extreme. Without giving away the season’s major twists, The Scare explores abusive authority and overt prejudice while also examining white supremacy within professional institutions.
The second season moves away from the suburban setting of Covenant and adopts more elements of a detective thriller. Its ’90s setting places the story in a different social context, but the atmosphere remains deeply alienating and dehumanizing.
Together, the two seasons establish Them as a combination of gothic, psychological, and folkloric horror. Gore and jump scares are present, but much of the tension comes from a slower and more oppressive descent into psychological turmoil.
That makes the anthology difficult viewing at times. Rather than offering straightforward scares, Them continually forces its characters and audience deeper into the trauma at the center of its stories.
That may help explain why the series stood out to Stephen King.
Stephen King’s Reaction to Them
Before Them: Covenant premiered in 2021, King shared his reaction to the first episode on social media.
“Amazon Prime Video: THEM, starting tomorrow. The first episode scared the hell out of me, and I’m hard to scare.”
He followed that with a particularly dark observation about the show’s imagery, mentioning the “extremely creepy white ladies in 50s dresses.”
Coming from King, the reaction carries particular weight. His career has been built largely around horror, and his stories have introduced audiences to threats ranging from a child-eating entity to a rabid Saint Bernard.
Yet Them managed to unsettle him without relying exclusively on familiar horror formulas.
Much of the series’ effectiveness comes from its atmosphere. The show does not depend entirely on gore, nor does it treat psychological horror simply as insanity or paranoia. Instead, it takes an apparently idyllic suburban setting and gradually turns it into a nightmare shaped by racism, intimidation, and abuse.
Little Marvin reinforces that transformation through the series’ visual contrast. Bright, pastel surroundings and carefully maintained appearances exist alongside deeply disturbing behavior. The apparent politeness of the Emorys’ neighbors becomes part of what makes them frightening.
Betty Wendell (Alison Pill) embodies that contradiction. She appears with a smile and immaculate clothing, but beneath that polished exterior is a woman determined to harass the Emory family.
The resulting tension comes from the uncertainty of where the next threat will emerge. The family is subjected to psychological warfare, manipulation, and gaslighting while the hostility surrounding them grows harder to escape.
Outside their home, their neighbors threaten them. Inside it, supernatural entities torment them. There is no reliable refuge, turning the Emorys’ experience into a sustained depiction of oppression that follows them wherever they go.
Why Stephen King’s Praise Makes Sense
King did not publicly comment on the rest of Them: Covenant or on Them: The Scare. His response to the opening episode, however, highlights one of the anthology’s defining strengths.
Them repeatedly connects supernatural horror with the trauma inflicted by other people. The hauntings intensify the characters’ fear and psychological distress, while the abuse they experience in the real world becomes every bit as frightening as the supernatural forces pursuing them.
That combination makes the anthology an unusually intense piece of modern horror. Its most effective scares come from atmosphere, sustained psychological pressure, and the disturbing realities beneath its supernatural stories.
For a horror writer as experienced as Stephen King to single out the first episode of Them as something that genuinely frightened him is a fitting endorsement of what Little Marvin’s anthology aims to achieve.