Editor’s Note: Nick Johnston is here at home remotely covering the 2021 Fantastic Fest. Click here for our continuing coverage, and click here for our complete archive of past Fantastic Fests.
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From preferred pizza toppings to athleisure-styled footwear, there are just some things that a lot of people enjoy that some simply can not abide by and/or understand. It’s all a matter of taste of course, but it’s typically pretty funny as hell to watch someone take up rhetorical arms to strike down those folks who happen to enjoy candy corn (it’s just mallow creme, guys, it’s meant to taste like marshmallow!), and “yucking someone’s yum” should be understood in this context. So you should understand when I say that “adaptations of YA-styled horror are the worst, and Netflix ones doubly so,” I’m not trying to insult the millions of stans out there who will be in some way gratified by watching a film as lame as Patrick Brice’s There’s Someone Inside Your House, but I’m merely expressing my own dumb opinion, which you can feel free to disregard should it cause you any trouble. Because, man, I really hated this movie, and I think it’s the conventions of Young Adult Cinema that made me feel like I wanted to claw my damn eyes out during most of this film’s 90-odd-minute runtime.
What do I mean by that? Well, imagine something like Riverdale and remove all the style, the pretenses of humor, and its genre-referential nature: what you’re ultimately left with is another story about high schoolers, some of whom look like they’re in their mid-30s (unless they’re one of the film’s main characters, given that the non-threatening kids assembled here are who we’re meant to relate to, and that part of the fun is watching this Man-Children get what they deserve without forcing us to remember that oh God, these are children getting killed) realizing that they are, in fact, Young Adults, who are just as mortal as the rest of us, and that their behavior-modeled inauthenticity is not just soul-killing but can be, in certain circumstances, fatal. That’s right, There’s Somone Inside Your House is basically I Know What You Did Last Summer, but the sins in question are football-team hazing, drug addiction, and somehow running a white supremacist podcast without anyone thinking that your voice might sound similar to the valedictorian of the local high school. That’s right, losers, we’re striking down the phonies in a way Holden Caulfield never had the stones to do: Vicious, gory murder.
That is, unless, you are our protagonist, Makani Young (Sydney Park), a transplant in a small town in Nebraska who was victimized and traumatized by an ugly experience she had at her old school and was forced to move in with her grandmother after the fallout. She has your standard modern Breakfast Club as a group of friends, such an aspiring astrophysicist (Jesse LaTourette) who’s been mistreated because of their gender identity, the cynic-with-a-heart-of-gold (Asjha Cooper), a pill-popping goofball (Anthony Timpano), a rich kid (Dale Whibley) who loves weed about as much as he hates his dad, who is looking to privatize the police force, and an estranged cigarette-smoking pseudo-boyfriend (Theodore Pellerin) who seems dangerous but actually isn’t. When the bodies start to fall, killed by a psycho slasher wearing 3D-printed masks of the victims, and people start linking the murders together by the fact that they all had important secrets they were desperate to hide, Makani begins to think that she might be next in line for skewering. There’s not much mystery to be had here, as you can probably guess the identity of the killer based on their potential access to a costly technology like 3D printing, but there is a whole lot of self-serious drama if you like that kind of thing.
But There’s Something Inside Your House is really just following where the money is. It’s fascinating how much high school-set YA fiction depends on the “secret” twist in order to have any merit, and I think it’s nearly time we retired this format. Sure, it worked for years and years, even up through Love, Simon, but it’s been bearing some diminishing returns recently, and the lesson it aims to teach — that one should have some measure of empathy for their fellow man — can often be lost on people when they’re at the age where they’ll be their most hormonally sociopathic. There’s a fundamental inertness when it comes to doing this with the slasher, one of the most historically conservative forms of horror (there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but if you were smoking grass and having premarital sex, eight out of ten times you were gonna get a knife to the throat) when also trying to appeal to the cultural tastes of a generation steeped in postmodern irony and who have an appreciable knowledge of genre conventions. There’s not any particular transgressive thrill to be found there, which is part of the appeal of the genre beyond its base scares and gore, nor is the film willing to go hard enough to make its victims appropriately despicable (or relatable!) to make it cathartic (or very scary!). You’re watching the same three or so archetypes get killed in each of these films, and you’re watching the same victim-empowerment narrative, which loses its power each and every time that it’s fucked up in this fashion.
Yet even the misfires are rarely this boring in practice. Brice does try to liven things up with some ample gore — the first kill, on a football jock who looks like he could be starting his eighth season at tight end for the Patriots, is a gnarly echo of the first Hostel, where the dude’s ACLs are slashed by an unseen assailant — but when the film drifts back into the high school setting, it loses any amount of verve or wit it’s generated in the SFX-heavy scenes. Perhaps you’re supposed to identify with the ensemble more viscerally and subsequently write yourself into the blanks left between where the characterization should be (or maybe you should just shut up and nod your head when they start spouting the dialogue equivalent of an Instagram info-dump about privilege or whatever), but I don’t know if that cuts it when one’s trying to reach zoomers where they are. There’s Someone Inside Your House just feels like the product created by a whole bunch of adults trapped into a room together by Netflix studio heats, tasked with figuring out just how the teens relate to each other with a whole bunch of focus-grouped spreadsheets about what the kids these days want out of their horror fictions. I don’t know what the answer to that question is either, but I’m much more inclined to say that it’s something that looks more like Us or any of the A24 horrors than whatever the hell this is. Horror, ultimately, is escapist fiction without the necessary interiority that might have made this story work on the pate, and the less concerned with The Problems That Teens Face that a film is the better suited for that audience.