'There’s Someone Inside Your House' (and They Know Your Netflix Password)

There’s Someone Inside Your House is keen on reviving older forms of slashers but can’t seem to fill it with purpose.

Netflix has a busy schedule this October. A mixture of family-friendly and very family-unfriendly spooky streaming options have been scheduled for numerous dates during the month, including the exciting announcement of another return of Elvira to the world of streaming. One such title that Netflix happens to be putting out for the month is There’s Someone Inside Your House, a slasher that feels like a call to return to form to the 90’s heyday of teen-centric drama like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream, and so on.

What it does well is package its story authentically for the revival it’s going for. It has an exciting cold open and introduces its characters well, dropping you into the most familiar cliques in horror history, the outcasts. We follow Makani Young, a girl who is spending her first year at Osborne High as a transfer from elsewhere and can’t seem to fit in. She’s already made friends with a group of kids by the time we meet her but seems to want to stay away from being the center of attention.

Osborne High is mourning the death of a beloved student who played on the football team, but the circumstances around it point to murder. As gossip spreads, more kids at the high school find themselves targeted. Once chosen, it is impossible to survive their encounter with the killer. The killing grounds for each victim is littered with photographic evidence of something in their past that they’ve tried to hide from others. Most slasher flicks employ a masked killer and There’s Someone Inside Your House is no exception, however provides a neat twist: each victim sees a different mask, but the image of their own face stalks them.

The kill sequences are easily the most entertaining and well-done parts of the movie, and the suspense leading up to them is done in a kinetic fashion that complements each gruesome violent act. Unfortunately, almost every other aspect of the film suffers. While it does a great job of setting up its characters and stakes, it doesn’t follow through to give itself a reason good enough to let the killer plot the way they do. The movie makes a point to be socially conscious which is commendable but, based on its own logic, it can’t measure up to the morals the killer is trying to employ with whatever lesson they’re attempting to teach.

There’s a scene in the midpoint of the second act that points to a visual representation of this: one of the misfit kids throws a huge party in his rich father’s mansion and it’s filled with what looks like the entire school. The killer eventually finds their way into the party, cutting the power and then revealing themselves for every kid to see (mask donned, of course). The veritable hundreds of partygoers immediately panic, exclaiming that the killer is there yet every single one of them flees from the house, pushing and shoving the victim and essentially stranding them there. It feels like an odd decision to have that happen when the killer could easily have been overtaken by the mere hundreds in the crowd, cutting their killing streak down considerably. But because the killer must kill this person and they hadn’t been unmasked or made their point clear yet, the crowd disperses for them.

The film also makes a point to include a nonbinary genderqueer character in the group of misfits but doesn’t spend time congratulating itself for having them there, which is still the dominant attitude from movies that make performative efforts to include marginalized people in their stories, yet continue to fetishize their existence and perpetuate harmful stereotypes or worse, misinformation. This does the opposite but only goes so far. We don’t spend any time on them being classified to the audience and for a brief moment becomes accepted at face value as a vital member of the gang. That is until a popular girl at school publicly ridicules her in an attempt to play the “I embrace all walks of life” card. She specifically outs them as nonbinary to the entire school in order to use her identity to further her own illusion of progress and inclusivity. While that’s a character decision, no attempt is made for the script to right that wrong, least of all address it. The editor could have even dropped a title card to transition to another scene that reads “Meanwhile…” and sweep it under the rug. Other than this scene there is no attempt to introduce this character proper to us. We are given this and a couple lines here and there about how they want to get into NASA (which I totally get. Space is cool) and no other development for them, doomed to sideline as a sympathetic character in the face of a more important heteronormative sexually charged relationship. I digress.

During the course of the movie we learn bits and pieces from Makani’s personal history as she adjusts to Osborne High, living with her grandmother and talking around her parents not being there with her. What begins to grow as a fairly central mystery ultimately fails to develop in a way that exemplifies whatever lesson is supposed to be on display here. It winds itself up to let us in on what this is all in service to but never really gets to a logical place. Its admittedly fresh framing of an unlikely group of outcast friends living in a world that doesn’t even pretend to care about them anymore (including their classmates) unfortunately doesn’t go into very many interesting places. It’s not a mark of bad filmmaking, just sadly uninteresting at the end of the day.

There’s Someone Inside Your House is available to stream on Netflix on October 6, 2021.

[this article was originally published on october 5, 2021 on celluloidconsomme.medium.com.]