"There's Someone Inside Your House" a solidly smart '90s-style slasher

There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021)

On the sliced heels of Netflix’s “Fear Street” trilogy comes another high-school slasher, “There’s Someone Inside Your House,” in which a killer cancels teens for their secrets. Based on the novel by Stephanie Perkins, this revival to late-‘90s slasher movies is reverent to the past but conceived with a very here-and-now sensibility without pandering or calling attention to itself. Director Patrick Brice (2019’s “Corporate Animals”) and writer Henry Gayden (2019’s “Shazam!”) put together a diverse group of characters worth a damn and craft several bloody, vicious kills. When it comes time to identify who’s carrying the knife, the payoff underwhelms, but that doesn’t stop “There’s Someone Inside Your House” from being a smart, entertaining post-“Scream” for a woke generation.

When the film opens for its first victim, there is a semi-meta quality to how the demise of high school football quarterback Jackson (Markian Tarasiuk) plays out. Once Jackson gets it through his pigskin brain that he might not be alone, he…goes back inside his house. The title card, “There’s Someone Inside Your House,” crashes onto the screen with a menacing music score, playing like the audience shouting back at Jackson to get out. In a ghoulish twist of the slasher formula that serves the character right, Jackson follows a trail of blackmailing photos, which reveal a violent hazing of a gay teammate, right into a bedroom closet. Once the killer reveals him or herself, Jackson is looking right back at himself through the killer, who is wearing a mask of Jackson’s face and ready to expose his secret. 

Makani Young (Sydney Park) might have the biggest secret of all. For reasons that will become clear later, she has transferred from Hawaii to live in the quiet Nebraska town of Osborne with her sleepwalking Gam (BJ Harrison) and finish her senior year of high school. She’s an outsider just like her close group of friends, including “bitch in residence” Alex (Asjha Cooper), non-binary Darby (Jesse LaTourette), painkiller-popping Rodrigo (Diego Josef), and resentful rich kid Zach (Dale Whibley). When the killer strikes, these friends put it together that they are about to be exposed for their deepest, darkest secrets and then canceled permanently. Who’s behind the mask? Is it Osborne scapegoat and Makani’s Billy Loomis-type boyfriend Ollie (Théodore Pellerin), or is he just a red herring because he’s a tall, dark, and mysterious smoker? No one’s secret—as benign as it might even be, like having a crush—is safe, and neither are their lives.

From centering on teenage friends, to a knife-wielding masked killer among them, to a town curfew and a house party while there’s a killer out there, “There’s Someone Inside Your House” does resemble “Scream” in a general sense. But like Wes Craven’s enduring genre game-changer, director Patrick Brice does keep this genre entry fresh and spiked with a healthy sense of humor (Makani’s “Get Well Soon” card laid down at a victim’s school memorial amuses). The characters are likable and distinct, even if some deserve significantly more screen time than what they’re given, and have a lived-in camaraderie. Sydney Park (2017's "Wish Upon") is appealing and sympathetic as Makani, who’s still reeling from a traumatic incident in Hawaii that has left her with a guilty conscience. Though the killer wearing each victim’s face sounds like a mere gimmick, Henry Gaden’s script does cleverly tie class privilege and how we all hide our true selves behind masks into the slashing and whodunit mystery. Not all of the characters’ skeletons in the closet are going to be on the same level, but Makani is the one coming away with a redemptive arc that matters the most.

The film does care about this core group before putting them through slice-and-dice situations. But it is those slice-and-slice moments that will grab the most attention. A set-piece in a church that puts a conservative twit under the knife is suspenseful and brutal, and another at a “secret party” is tense and heartbreaking, widening the playing field where anyone can get it, even in heavily populated areas. Director Brice clearly knows what horror fans want to see in terms of their slasher set-pieces and stages them so well that a few more would have been preferred. The soundtrack, consisting of Sharon Van Etten’s “Jupiter 4” and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark’s “Secrets,” is also well-chosen.

Admittedly, the reveal of the killer in a corn maze set ablaze is a letdown. It’s arguably a throwback to ‘90s slashers where the killer explains him or herself to the survivors, but still pretty standard and over too quickly. Points are deserved for being self-aware enough about the killer’s creepy, if presumably time-consuming, process of making each mask with a 3D printer. How the film closes, though, is just right, leaving us with the people we’ve just spent time with and wishing them well. As we have stuck until the end with old friends from Woodsboro, Haddonfield, and Shadyside, “There’s Someone Inside Your House” stakes a new home for genre fans to latch onto in Osborne, at least for the moment. 

Grade: B

Netflix is releasing “There’s Someone Inside Your House” (96 min.) to stream on October 6, 2021.