THEM draws upon real historical background for its horrors, including a World War II program that tested the effects of mustard gas and other chemical weapons on American soldiers based on race. The horror anthology’s first season follows the Emory family as they move to an all-white neighborhood in Compton, California during the 1950s and are plagued by horrors from both their racist neighbors and the apparitions in their house. Henry Emory, a World War II veteran, is haunted by his years in the war, especially his experience as the subject of a brutal chemical weapons experiment.
In a flashback to the Emorys’ life in North Carolina, Henry is dealing with his PTSD from the war. He reveals to Lucky that they used him and other soldiers in experiments that tested the effects of nerve gas and mustard gas. As he settles into a new job as an engineer years later, the Emorys’ haunting manifests for him partly in memories of soldiers trapped in a room filled with mustard gas. This element of the story is based on a real Department of Defense program that was declassified in 1993.
During World War II, the Pentagon enrolled 60,000 enlisted American soldiers as test subjects in experiments that exposed them to chemical weapons to understand their potential effects, one of many secret government experiments in the 20th century. The soldiers were further grouped by race to test for differences in the effects. The purpose of the experiment was reportedly to establish whether Black and Puerto Rican soldiers were more resistant to chemical attacks than white soldiers and could therefore be used more heavily on the front lines, though the Pentagon has never confirmed the motivation behind the experiment. Japanese-American soldiers were also tested as proxies for enemy Japanese soldiers. White soldiers were enrolled as a control group to establish the “normal” reaction for comparison.
There were three types of experiments in the program, including the chamber tests shown in THEM where soldiers were locked in a room filled with mustard gas. Liquid mustard gas was also applied to the soldiers’ skin, and soldiers were exposed to mustard gas outdoors to simulate combat. Test subjects were offered no additional healthcare or monitoring for lasting physical or psychological effects — like PTSD. Mustard gas causes chemical burns on the skin and in the lungs, and exposure to the gas mutates DNA and increases the risk of cancer, so some soldiers were still living with the results of the experiment decades later. The program was classified, so the enrolled soldiers had no proof that it happened and could receive a dishonorable discharge or a prison sentence for revealing their participation.
The mustard gas experiments in THEM were a terrible chapter in the U.S. government’s long history of medical racism. This testing also took place while segregation was still in place in the military and Japanese-American civilians were interned in camps under suspicion of sympathizing with or aiding the enemy. Among its other horrors, THEM exposes a lesser-known dark chapter of World War II.