On paper, Patrick Brice’s idea for a high school slasher film sounds interesting. Writer/director who made his name with the indie sex comedy The Overnight and two entries in the Mark Duplass-starring Creep horror series is known for his willingness to expose himself emotionally on screen.
The result, especially in the case of Creep, crackles with exquisitely balanced tension, which plays out in a cat-and-mouse game between two compelling and believable leads.
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Theres Someone Inside Your House Review Problematic Secrets
This is old hat for horror fans, but putting Brice’s character-building chops to use in a high school horror setting similar to Scream seems like it could be a great way to avoid falling into the traps of formula.
While There’s Someone Inside Your House is skillfully shot and staged, it feels very similar and lacks the emotional complexity and attention to character detail that we’ve come to identify with Brice’s previous work.
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Because the 2017 Stephanie Perkins novel of the same name served as inspiration for the new Netflix horror film, this may be an understandable oversight. Instead, Shazam! was co-written by the team behind There’s Someone Inside Your House.
Henry Gayden, the film’s writer; one has to question if the fact that a 41-year-old guy was tasked with penning the dialogue for a group of feminist high school students comprised of 17-year-olds would have been an early warning sign that the film would fail to hit its intended tone.
In any case, it’s a decision that might get extremely near to the kind of lip-service, fake wokeness that these characters despise. Writing snarky speech for a trans teen while also adopting the vocabulary of pop-culture feminism seems like a bit of a stretch. My gut tells me that these people would call bullshit on this theory if given the chance.
The Protagonist, is a Newcomer
Regardless, Makani (Sydney Park), the protagonist, is a newcomer to town who has fled her past loaded with regrets and sensationalised media articles, and she is joined by a fairly normal cast of potential victims and disguised psycho killers in There’s Someone Inside Your House.
Despite Park’s charisma, which horror fans will recognise from her recurring role on The Walking Dead, Makani isn’t written to be particularly likeable or clever; she is cruel to her potential love interest and usually escapes peril through dumb luck and plot armour rather than the kind of courage or resourcefulness that would win us over.
However, when a serial killer begins preying on members of her high school’s senior class because of their dark pasts, she finds that her past is working against her. This killer wears 3D-printed masks of the victims’ faces and taunts them with their past transgressions as he murders them.
This film ultimately shares a lot of DNA with the still-superior Fear Street Part 1: 1994, and the first sequence of this film is a blatant rip-off of Scream.
The Actual Cutting Sequences Stand Up
Neither the story nor the actual cutting sequences stand up to the surprisingly gory material portrayed in Leigh Janiak’s Netflix trilogy, Fear Street.
You have to give There’s Someone Inside Your House credit for its impressive use of arterial splashes and foley, but the film ultimately falters due to its over-reliance on stock stabs aimed at Makani’s undeveloped teen co-stars.
Too many characters are introduced, maybe as filler to keep the number of possible red herrings artificially inflated, but this has the unintended consequence of having none of them feel like they play a significant role in the plot.
In the end, each of Makani’s closest friends is reduced to a couple lines that explain their character and a fatal flaw/secret for the killer to potentially exploit, often awkwardly related to a hot-button societal problem like the opioid crisis.
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Having said that, there are some Appealing Aspects to the Picture, and the 96 Minutes fly by.
There are brief instances of excellent dialogue, some humorously broad high school parodies (such as a group of football players raising a toast to a fallen teammate by saying, “I hope they’re pouring Fireball in paradise, brother”), and one or two slashings that can be placed in the same loose category as the films they were inspired by.
Is that scary enough to warrant a weeknight viewing during the height of Halloween season? As long as you’ve already visited Fear Street, then sure.
Patrick Brice is the director.
Contributor: Henry Gayden
Actors Sydney Park, Théodore Pellerin, Asjha Cooper, Jesse LaTourette, Diego Josef, and Dale Whibley also star.
On sale: October 6, 2021 (Netflix)