It’s hard to come across a modern day horror film and find anything other than gore. With films like Hostel and the Saw and their sequels it seems that filmmakers nowadays think that only copious amounts of blood makes a film scary. Well, let me tell you, it’s getting a little tiresome, actually a lot tiresome, and it’s great to see a film like Them which fully realises this.

A couple living in a large and isolated house wake up one night to strange noises and soon realise that they are not alone. And soon after they are being terrorised by a group of unknown attackers.

In the genre of horror the term 'short and sweet' has been given a definitive example in the form of Them, or Ils to use its original language title. At just a hair under 75 minutes this is a great example of keeping things short and at a pace that makes the whole thing seem even shorter. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun… or scared half to death, right?

To be negative for a moment, the film takes a bit too long to get into the full swing of things. Despite its shocking opening scene, which in retrospect feels very much like a sign of things to come, it slows down to almost a snail’s pace and there follows a stretch of almost fifteen minutes of frustratingly relaxed proceedings. The couple watch a little TV and thereafter head to bed. But things eventually start to turn sour as we start hearing strange noises such as footsteps, blaring music from the couple’s car outside, and an eerie phone call that echoes stuff like The Grudge or the dreaded call from The Ring. From then on the movie turns it up to eleven, to quote This Is Spinal Tap, and only stops for an insanely creepy silence to soak over you before bursting out at you once again with a loud noise or a frantic chase scene. Once it gets into the flow of things it’s frenetic and extremely heart-pounding stuff.

Sometimes what you don’t know, or see, is what’s scariest; it’s precisely what the torture porn films don’t seem to realise. Everyday things that might not seem remotely frightening soon become so when you can’t identify them and while there’s no other noise or even light to help you feel safe. You know that feeling you get in the middle of the night when you think you see someone and when you turn on the light it turns out to be just a coat hanging on the door? That’s the technique Them employs – it takes seemingly safe things and makes them utterly frightening because we don’t know what they are or who’s causing them to be there.