There's nothing to get excited about in the Netflix slasher There's Someone Inside Your House
These teens make good company, but the horror movie in which they're trapped is strictly rote.
Surviving a horror movie, according to Scream’s Randy Meeks, requires avoiding “the sin factor”—you can’t drink, do drugs, or (especially) have sex. Any such transgression, however seemingly harmless, serves to define you as impure, qualifying you to be slaughtered by the film’s inevitably faceless killer. Our collective notion of what constitutes bad behavior has shifted of late, however, and Netflix’s rather bluntly titled There’s Someone Inside Your House (oh no!) provides up-to-date reasons for good-looking teens to get slashed and skewered—which is to say, permanently canceled. Homophobic hazing, white supremacy and opioid abuse (as distinct from purely recreational drug use) all rear their ugly heads, giving this example of the genre even more of a moralistic tinge than usual. Why the murderer feels compelled to don a 3-D printed mask of each victim’s own face isn’t entirely clear—nothing about, say, recording a repugnant podcast episode merits symbolic self-inflicted harm—but, hey, it’s a novel gimmick.
Frankly, it’s somewhat novel that Someone Inside—adapted, despite its seemingly algorithm-generated title, from a novel by Stephanie Perkins—eschews ’80s and ’90s nostalgia, taking place firmly in the present day. (Among other modern fillips, the killer texts evidence of victims’ misdeeds to the entire student body.) It’s set in the fictional town of Osborne, Nebraska, to which Makani Young (The Walking Dead’s Sydney Park) has fairly recently moved following some traumatic event that’s left strategically vague for most of the film. A sensitive type who writes poetry, Makani has made plenty of friends among Osborne High’s cool kids, but has apparently told none of them about whatever dark secret from her past she’s harboring. The killer may well know, however, and many of her friends suspect the town’s notorious problem child, Ollie (Théodore Pellerin, devoid of accent but looking as French as his name), with whom Makani’s been having a hush-hush romance for some time. Plus, it just so happens that she’s temporarily all alone at her house, which we have pretty solid reason to fear that someone else may eventually be inside (oh no!).