‘Them’ Director Nelson Cragg Breaks Down the Horror Series’ Most Intense Scenes

Them tries to capture the impossible. As Amazon Prime Video’s latest anthology series follows one one Black family who moves from North Carolina to the picture-perfect hellscape that is a white Los Angeles neighborhood in the 1950s, it focuses on the full range of terror that comes with being other in a world actively working against you. Them‘s ever terrifying and constantly breathless tone is largely thanks to its lead director and executive producer, Nelson Cragg.

Cragg directed four episodes of Them‘s 10-episode first season. And considering the director’s credentials, it’s not surprising he was able to craft Them‘s heart-pounding tone. Decider spoke to Cragg about how coming up with American Horror Story and Ryan Murphy helped him shape the tone of Them. He also explained exactly how he captured those all-too-intimate closeups and walked through the most emotionally draining scene of the series — baby Chester’s death — as well as Them’s most challenging directorial moment. The latter is a scene you would never expect.

Decider: First I need to address the big news. Stephen King tweeted about Them. What was your reaction to that?

Nelson Cragg: Oh my god, it was so exciting to wake up to my agent, he sent me the quote.It was amazing news to wake up to. Obviously I’m a huge Stephen King fan. I read The Stand a million times, everything he’s ever written from 20 years ago until now. Just to know that I scared Stephen King, I can die happy.

Speaking of scaring people, Them. It feels bad to say that I loved this because I actually hated it. I watched most of Them through my fingers. It feels the whole time like you’re holding in a breath when you’re really scared. How did you establish that tone?

When I first met him on the show, I talked to Little Marvin — the writer and creator. He told me that it was a show about not horror but terror. What I took that to mean was this is a show about a family, a beautiful family, that’s in a situation that they cannot escape from, from the outside world — the reality of their situation with racist neighbors and the racial injustices that happen to them — and their own minds with this supernatural, malevolent presence that’s haunting them. So the idea with the show was to never let up. It’s going to be too intense for a lot of people, and we knew that some people were not going to like that because it’s so in-your-face. But the tone that I wanted to create was this breathless, almost exhausting kind of experience to put the audience in the shoes of someone who, what does it feel like to be terrorized from within and from without? What does it feel like to be other in a society that doesn���t want you as part of it? That’s the experience I was trying to create as a director for the audience. Hearing what you’re saying, I feel like we were successful.

It certainly came across for me. What I thought was so pointed and brilliant about Them’s directorial style is that it never feels explicitly like horror. Terror and horror is threaded throughout but it also sometimes it has comedic tones. Sometimes it’s a straight family drama. Did you feel yourself incorporating these other genres as you were working?

Absolutely. For me the show is never really a horror show. What I wanted to bring to it, I wanted you to care about these characters and this family. Yes, these horrible things happen and happen in real life to people, but … for me it’s about creating a world where you really care about this family. If you care about this family then you can really believe and feel emotions when you see these horrible things happen to them. So it was really important to create a really specific tone, and I learned that from working with Ryan Murphy for so many years. He’s the master of that. He’s able to kind of weave a tone that can veer from surreal to operatic to dramatic all in one scene. That’s really difficult to do. But that’s what I tried to bring to the show as well.

How did you learn to do that? How do you weave these threads so intricately? Because Ryan Murphy is the master of that, like you said, and it comes across in your work beautifully. 

Ryan and I just kind of found each other. He really mentored me. He gave me my first directing job, which was American Horror Story: Roanoke. My first experience directing for Ryan was actually on FEUD.

Helen Hunt was directing the episode, and I was actually cinematographer on that. She had an unfortunate family emergency she had to tend to, so she had to leave. So we’re all standing there. We have Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon. We’re on location, and Ryan calls me. He’s like, “I need you to direct this scene.” And I was like, “I haven’t even prepared. I haven’t prepared to direct the scene. I prepared to shoot it.” So he was like, “You’ve got to do this. I trust you.” And I was like, “OK.” I did it. So my first directing experience is directing Jessica Lange, which is terrifying. She’s scary. She eats people alive. But it was great. It turned into a good scene and it worked, it made the cut. That was a really great experience.

Then I came to Ryan and said, “I really enjoyed doing that.” And he said, “OK. Do an episode of American Horror Story.” It went really well. Ryan is a really visual director and he demands great visuals and images. I felt comfortable working in an environment that what I created, I was always able to keep learning and growing. He really nurtured me and we went on to do Pose, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Ratched. We did a whole bunch of shows in a row. It was just an amazing experience to work side-by-side with him. And Ryan, he’ll say that he needs strong No. 2s because he has so many shows. Oftentimes Ryan will launch two, three shows in a year, and he will only be able to do the pilot but then he will need people to follow up. So oftentimes I would work on different projects, launch different shows, we’d go to show to show and just try to create a lot of amazing stories, stories of people that hadn’t been told before.

I’m consistently impressed with Murphy ability to target and pinpoint talented people such as yourself and stepping aside to let you guys shine and actually make things your own. That’s kind of a rarity.

Absolutely. I mean Ryan is a unique individual, and there’s no one else like him. That’s why he’s at the top of the game. He’s one of the best producers. He’s probably the best producer I’ve ever worked with and certainly will ever work with. He’s got an amazing eye to find and give people voices. I was a young Korean cinematographer, and I really had dreams to direct but I hadn’t been given the opportunity. Ryan saw that talent. He’s bold enough and smart enough to just give you that chance. That’s really, really rare.

I remember sitting on set with him on [The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story] and he was like, “There are no female directors available.” He turned to me and he was like, “You know, I want to do something about it.” Like a week later he created the Half Initiative, which is a mentorship program for minorities and females, which has been incredibly successful in launching Maggie Kylie’s career, Alexis Ostrander, who is my mentee in that program. It was amazing to see him do that. He saw a problem in the industry, which was there weren’t a lot of females or minorities directing, and he did something about it. He put his money where his mouth was. He changed the industry. Because of my relationship with Ryan I’ve been incredibly fortunate enough to take on other projects like Them and many more projects to come. It’s been an honor to come out of that program and Ryan’s world.

Bringing it back to Them, I wanted to talk a bit about Episode 5’s tragic baby death scene. I don’t know how you guys got through that day on set. When you first got the scripts for the Chester death scene, what were your thoughts?

It was really hard for me to read because I have a young son who, at the time, was around Chester’s age. That episode to me was something I personally — it was a little too much for me. So that director, Janicza [Bravo], is incredibly talented and she handled the heavy lifting on that episode. I was around. But that was incredibly difficult to see.

That scene capitalizes of a directorial style used throughout Them. It focuses on characters’ faces the whole time instead of the larger surroundings. It’s a lot of close ups. How important was it for you to always focus on faces in these very intimate shots?

We wanted the story, again, to really be about the characters and the emotions of these actors. Especially in horror and thriller, you don’t always want to show everything. You can’t show everything because there’s a line you don’t want to cross. So how do you do that?

In this show it was about emotional intensity and capturing these amazing, tight closeups. Extreme closeups can help convey that emotion, so you can feel what’s happening but you don’t have to see everything. That’s what we tried to bring to it. We would use a lot of diopters, which allow you to get the camera really close to people to capture those emotions. I’m a big believer as a director that the closer you can get camera to somebody the more you can really feel like you’re intimate and translate those emotions on screen. That’s what we tried to bring from a stylistic standpoint.

Were there any challenges in getting that close to actors so consistently?

It’s always difficult. What people don’t see when you make a movie or a TV show is that we have these huge cameras, you have lights, you have all this gear, you have a crew operating it. We were using a specific set of lenses — anamorphic lenses — which oftentimes don’t let you get that close because of their technical limitations and how close they’ll focus. So we would overcome that by using these diopters and split diopters, which allow you to change the way the lenses focus and you can get really close to the actors. We’d oftentimes take off the matte box, which is a big thing that holds filters and blocks light from the lens in front of the camera so that we could get the lens even closer to people. You have to be aware of that. It’s difficult, and it’s harder for the DPs and everything. But again it translates that emotion because you can get really close to somebody.

A lot of times we started shaking the camera mildly. There’s a scene where Henry’s [Ashley Thomas] boss — he’s at his office — and he’s kind of being attacked. All of the microaggressions from this psychopathic boss, sociopathic boss. And he goes to the bathroom and he just screams into these towels. I really wanted to capture that feeling of you can’t let your rage out, but how do you escape that mental prison? We decided to vibrate the camera as the scream intensifies. It creates a really visceral reaction. We really wanted those moments to translate to being intense and for the audience to feel them.

I know exactly what scene you’re talking about. It’s such a smart use because it feels like the whole structure of the show itself is breaking as Henry’s having a breakdown.

Yeah, and you have to be careful with that because you don’t want to be too much. The show is very — we often asked is it too much? Have we earned this moment? That’s a phrase I like to use a lot with the actors. Have we earned it, the scream? And in this case the actors did such an amazing job and the material is so good that yes. I think we did earn a lot of those moments to have a silent exploration and to really go big. The material supports that. In a show like Them you have to be bold and go for it.

What was the most challenging scene to film?

There’s this seven-minute pie-eating sequence. I would say that was the hardest for me. It wouldn’t seem like a difficult scene but from a directing standpoint that scene there was almost no dialogue. It’s like seven minutes long. It’s just looks and eating this pie. You have to tell this story of trauma and PTSD and Henry’s history of being in the war, the mother — Lucky Emory [Deborah Ayorinde] — fighting with her husband, and then them kind of resolving it within this scene without words. How do you do that with images and looks? You also have child actors.

This is a funny aside, but the actors requested a gluten-free pie. One of them was gluten intolerant. What that means is that the pie did not hold together; the crust didn’t hold right. So it had all kinds of prop issues, and resetting the pie was nightmare. [Thomas] had to eat this entire piece of pie a couple times. And it’s really emotional he has to have this breakdown. It was a difficult scene.

But as big as these traumatic PTSD moments are we really want the audience to feel that the tear and the PTSD and the trauma that these people have gone through. This show really wants to comment on our current racial issues. We’re in the real world. There are a lot of racial attacks on Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, obviously the African American community is suffering. We want to talk about these things in a way that’s current. As an Asian American director — I’m Korean — you want to face some of these fears and these terrors and these moments head on and show them on screen because they’re happening in the real world right now. While it’s hard to talk about, I think it’s worthwhile to talk about and cover these stories.

That’s one of the most shocking and great things about this project. It’s 70 years in the past but a lot of what it’s covering and the attitudes are depressingly modern. It’s truly a horror story.

We’re using art as a bit of activism. We want to tell these stories but also affect people and get them to possibly understand what it’s like to be other, to be African American or Korean or Asian or Pacific Islander. What could that feel like? If we can tell that story honestly then I think we’re doing our jobs.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Watch Them on Prime Video