There’s a Problem Inside the Script of There’s Someone Inside Your House
Photos via Netflix
On paper, a high school slasher film from director Patrick Brice seems like an intriguing enough idea. The director of indie sex comedy The Overnight and two installments in the Mark Duplass-starring Creep horror series has made his mark as a writer/director driven to bare it all, emotionally speaking, and particularly in the case of Creep, the result crackles with an exquisitely balanced tension playing out in a cat-and-mouse game between two compellingly believable leads. This is old news to horror geeks, but to see Brice potentially bring that same skill with characterization to a Scream-like high school horror setting feels like a setup that could potentially work wonders in cutting through the tropey treacle. Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House is a considerably more rote endeavor in mass-market horror filmmaking—competently shot and staged, but decidedly familiar, it displays none of the emotional nuance or attention to character detail we’ve associated with Brice in the past.
This is perhaps easily enough explained by the fact that Brice didn’t write this new Netflix horror flick, an adaptation of author Stephanie Perkins’ 2017 novel by the same name. Instead, There’s Someone Inside Your House has a writing credit for Shazam! scribe Henry Gayden, and one wonders if a 41-year-old man writing dialog for 17-year-old feminist high school students should perhaps have been the first indication that the film would ultimately miss its tone just a bit. Regardless, it’s a choice that may veer uncomfortably close to the exact sort of lip-service, performative wokeness that these characters are so disgusted by. Can you really write a story with a bitchy, blonde senior class president being punished for appropriating the language of pop-culture feminism while doing the same thing yourself in attempting to write snarky dialogue for a trans teen? Why do I have a feeling these characters wouldn’t hesitate to cry bullshit on this idea?
Regardless, There’s Someone Inside Your House lines up a pretty stock-standard lineup of potential victims and cloaked psycho killers, led by protagonist Makani (Sydney Park), a new-in-town young woman fleeing a past life filled with regrets and sensationalized tabloid headlines. Park, previously seen by horror fans in a semi-regular role on The Walking Dead, has an appealing presence, but Makani isn’t written to be particularly likeable or clever—she treats her would-be romantic partner badly and tends to survive her brushes with danger through dumb luck and plot armor rather than the kind of courage or resourcefulness that would get us on her side. Her dark past becomes a true liability, however, when a killer specifically targeting those with secrets begins picking off members of the graduating senior class, taunting them with their misdeeds while wearing realistic, 3D-printed masks of their own faces. An opening scene apes Scream succinctly enough without mirroring the actual movements in the style of the still-superior Fear Street Part 1: 1994, with which this film ultimately shares quite a bit of DNA.