There’s value in diversifying horror’s most familiar tropes, just as there’s value in making inclusivity so normal that there are just as many average-to-terrible queer movies, Indigenous movies and disabled movies as there are average-to-terrible movies made for and about straight, able-bodied white folks. The more times seemingly dissimilar groups go through their own versions of a genre’s formal conventions, the easier it is to appreciate these differentiating factors while recognizing the greater connectivity lurking underneath. Rather than a symptom of homogenization, this showcases how our shared fears and hopes persist through a multicultural lens. A Hindu character using a mantra, a spiritual weapon every Western horror audience knows (“The power of Christ compels you!”), to defeat a demonic presence is enriching in part because of its seamless integration into the genre. And yet, simply adding a sheen of cultural specificity to something like the monstrous metaphor—especially one as mixed as It Lives Inside’s uncertain hydra of assimilation and pubescent angst—will still result in the half-hearted, ineffective execution of a formula.
Writer/director Bishal Dutta’s feature debut is quickly distracted away from all the elements that initially make it stand out. We meet Samidha (Megan Suri) as she’s shaving her arms, putting on preppy clothes and speaking Hindi for her white friend’s social media clout. She pines over Russ (Gage Marsh), a happy-go-lucky hunk with comically floppy hair. She goes by Sam. Her mom (Neeru Bajwa), more than her non-character dad, resents all this. Sam’s childhood friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) is far less concerned with selling her culture for popularity. She sticks to tradition. Thing is, she’s also haunted by the black, scorched residue at the bottom of the mason jar she carries around. It lives inside, you see.
It Lives Inside gestures at the larger theme—the damaging cultural shame and pressure to conform faced by the children of immigrants—coursing through its setting, but only at its bookends. A Scooby-Doo high school haunting tiptoes between these broadstroke supports, evading anything novel or frightening in favor of Dutta’s calling-card flourishes and a confusing creature.
After the demonic pishacha that Tamira totes around inevitably escapes, Tamira disappears. In the course of sloppily investigating this, Sam has bad dreams, gets her crush Russ and over-involved teacher Joyce (Betty Gabriel) wrapped up in things, and otherwise follows horror-heroine worst practices as best she can. Her foe follows suit.
Though rooted in folklore, the pishacha is confoundingly untethered. Not only are its aims vague (it needs to mentally break its victims in order to devour their souls…eventually), the ways it interacts with the movie and its inhabitants are indecipherable.
Is it a spirit, or is it a creature? Is its presence in your dark closet, glowing eyes peering out, an inescapable haunting? Or did it just walk in there? Sometimes the pishacha seems incorporeal, unable to be grabbed by a fearful Joyce; then, it pushes its face against a shower curtain. To build suspense (and, presumably, to save a little money), the pishacha is almost entirely invisible until the end of the movie, when it’s revealed as a wet, dog-like Mad God monster mostly made of teeth. But its invisibility also doesn’t make a lot of sense. When a character is killed by the pishacha strangling him with a swing set, we can’t make out traces of the invisible demon actually doing it. It’s more like a standard poltergeist movie, where an omnipotent force, unattached to any physical being, just snags a character and shakes them around like a rag doll, defying gravity. But then the rules change again, and the pishacha seems to have a cloaking device akin to the Predator—a toss of powder is enough to reveal the otherworldly attacker.
It’s screenwriting that has ideas for individual scenes, but not for a feature bound together by them. Its setpieces—like the monster in the closet moment, and a sequence where the invisible demon’s approach is represented by a cascade of motion-detecting lights in a school hallway—are so varied and textbook that It Lives Inside loses all personality.
The only scare that’s especially notable is for its stupidity. Joyce, tasked with doing the research on what this critter actually is, hides from the pishacha in a tiny bathroom that’s light is on an automatic timer. The premise of the scene is that each time she turns the ticking, spring-wound switch, the room goes dark and the invisible monster in there with her makes a noise indicating that it would very much like to murder her. So she hastily cranks it back on. Phew! The safety of light. But it’s a timer. She could just leave the bathroom, lit up bright as day, and the light would turn off after she’s long gone. It’s completely ridiculous and makes a long Joyce sidequest that forgets all about Sam even funnier.
It Lives Inside feints early on towards something more meaningful, so it’s all the more depressing that it’s defined less by its puja and offerings of food than by things like a dream sequence that sends one of those cookie-cutter creepy contortionists after Sam. Dutta rarely invests in fleshing out the unique aspects of his film, things like his displaced hero and ravenous villain. The cast overcompensates with big acting, which further pulls us out of the world—it’s already hard for dread to set in when we’re still trying to figure out the movie’s rules as the credits roll. But, while It Lives Inside may fail to fulfill its complicated mother-daughter dynamic, its acceptance and weaponization of heritage, or simply the promise to be scary, it does allow Dutta plenty of opportunities to put together an enticing sizzle reel.
Shot by Dutta’s longtime collaborator Matthew Lynn, It Lives Inside uses an unexpectedly vigorous bag of visual tricks to convey what its script can’t. Sam is supposed to be losing sleep (and thus, her sanity), which sends her floating through life on a handful of Spike Lee’s double dolly shots. Deep oranges and reds hide the film’s demonic hideout in a hellish haze, always allowing an inciting fire to play in the back of our mind. Even in truly dull scenes of dialogue, a pretty cool split diopter shot might break up the monotony. The biggest miss is the derivative final shot, with a single falling tear from frozen wide eyes not expressing their true emotions, drawing an unfavorable Get Out comparison (especially considering the two films share financial backers and Gabriel).
But the final shot is fitting: “Derivative” is mostly all It Lives Inside ends up being. And, like I said, that’s not the end of the world. There’s plenty of space for mediocre box-checkers that skew the average away from the privileged status quo. I hope for a world in which even our bad horror movies are more representative of the people who live in it. That doesn’t stop it from being disappointing when a talented new voice puts their mark on a well-worn premise, but doesn’t commit to their own spin. It Lives Inside shows that a generic, uncertain script isn’t improved with a single coat of paint, especially if the ugly original is bleeding through the patchy, translucent renovation.
Director: Bishal Dutta
Writer: Bishal Dutta
Starring: Megan Suri, Neeru Bajwa, Mohana Krishnan, Vik Sahay, Gage Marsh, Beatrice Kitos, Betty Gabriel
Release Date: September 22, 2023
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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