Kevin Bacon's conversion camp gets bloody in the first full trailer for They/Them

Ever since Peacock first announced the existence of They/Them—the NBC-related streamer’s upcoming film about teens at a Kevin Bacon-run conversion camp where a bunch of slasher-style murders start breaking out—one of the biggest questions surrounding the project has been tone. Would the presentation of kids getting killed at night (while having their identities presumably attacked by the facility’s staff during the day) go tongue-in-cheek? Deadly serious? Or, for lack of a less punny term, strictly camp?

Well, now we at least know what tone the film’s trailer is going for, and it’s distinctly “How do we make this look like a Jordan Peele elevated horror kind of thing, huh?” (They even have those clipped strings on the soundtrack while a therapist says menacing things!) The trailer showcases Bacon in “reasonable weirdo” mode, as he and wife Carrie Preston (plus camp medic Anna Chlumsky) welcome a host of new teens to Camp Whistler, an LGBTQIA+ conversion camp. Each of the kids (played by Theo Germaine, Quei Tann, Austin Crute, Monique Kim, Anna Lore, Cooper Koch, and Darwin Del Fabro) have their own reasons to be at the camp, citing everything from deals with parents to a desire to escape bullying. And all of them, apparently, are fodder for the masked killer roaming the camp.

Even after watching the trailer, it’s still not entirely clear what kind of experience viewers of They/Them are going to get when it debuts on August 5; the benefit of the doubt, and the inclusive nature of the project’s casting, suggests that the movie has more on its mind than watching awful things happen to a bunch of teens who are already subjected to those on a regular basis by society. But it’s difficult to grok what the movie’s actual angle is. In any case, we’ll presumably know more when They/Them arrives on the streaming service next month.