The pursuit is one of Horror’s gifts to cinema. Directors Moreau and Palud know it and have made this one big chase scene...and have the smarts to make it work.

Clementine (Bonamy), a French teacher living in Romania, shares a huge mansion house with her student husband, Lucas (Cohen).

Their idyll is shattered one night when a group of mysterious, largely unseen intruders break in and subject the couple to a campaign of psychological and physical violence.

As the chase spills into the neighbouring woods and sewer system, and Clem and Lucas are repeatedly out-witted by their stalkers, dawn seems a long way off...

In the tradition of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Deliverance, Them plays the horror game of strangers in a strange-land to the hilt, where even local TV soaps seem threatening, and the actual locals really are.

Using inky blackness, menacing pools of flickering light and unnerving shrieks and howls, Them is an uncompromising fear engine.

The low-grade HD photography will grate with audiences expecting a highly-polished sheen, but the directors know exactly where to put the camera for maximum shock effect: screwdrivers are driven through keyholes; silhouettes dart in front of snowy TV screens and slowly come into focus from behind plastic sheeting.

A third act twist, apparent early on to those paying attention, throws a different light and social subtext on what’s gone on before, but like such horror greats as Hostel and The Evil Dead, Them’s purpose is to scare the pants off you. And it does.

Cohen and Bonamy do everything expected of couple with "victim" written all over then and the film dodges any Hollywood-style lapses of prosthetic-heavy final reels.

Catch Them before they catch you.

Rob Daniel