The kids aren’t all right.
“Teenagers have secrets” is a common movie trope, and “teenagers getting killed off one by one for their dumb teen secrets” is an equally common horror trope. At least as far back as the mid-nineties, with Jennifer Love Hewett playing the newly established Neve Campbell type in the glossy, popular I Know What You Did Last Summer, good looking twenty-somethings have been playing good looking high school students in danger of being hacked up for some transgression in their recent past. In this Netflix original from last year, based on a 2017 book by the same name, the secrets are not the result of an accidental murder like they often are in these types of stories, but more boiler-plate high school stuff like participating in hazing or having a drug problem. In fact, watching the movie I felt like the motives of the killer appeared to be fairly disjointed, and by the time the big revelations have all been unveiled, nothing had changed my opinion in that regard.
That disjointedness extends to the rest of the movie, as well. Its like there are all these parts of a successful teen slasher film, but none of them hang together in any meaningful way. There are multiple references to racism, from the characters’ dialogue, to one of the victim’s secret being that they recorded a podcast espousing the merits of white nationalism, to one of the central teen’s father collecting a slew of Nazi artifacts. Lord knows, racism is a worthy topic for a horror movie to tackle, and directors from Jordan Peele to George Romero have had success exploring that theme in their works. Yet, There’s Someone Inside Your House doesn’t seem interested in exploration, and instead all of those elements come off like mere window dressing. And racism makes shitty window dressing as it turns out. Similarly, there is an entire subplot involving the attempted privatization of the town’s police force which just sort of sits there without any deeper ties to the movie’s subtext. I don’t know if these missed opportunities lie with the book which has been adapted for the screen, or simply a failure of the adaptation, but it is frustrating that the filmmakers squander a huge platform and some solid performances without paying any of that setup off.
The plot is shaped like this type of plot is always shaped, with a few red herrings, and one very obvious red herring that could never be the killer because it would be too obvious, and then a reveal that the actual killer was someone we never expected all along. All of that is fine, and pretty much what I expected out of this film. I just wished it had either fully invested in exploring a concept or allowed itself to be a straight-forward teen slasher with nothing more to say, rather than occupying this weird liminal space in between the two. Its great that Netflix and other streaming platforms starved for content are providing an outlet for films that might not get a chance in the studio system of prior generations, but its hard not to notice the lack of quality control in a lot of these releases. If There’s Someone In Your House (misleading name, by the way) had a couple more rounds of script revision, I think it could have stood a chance at being a solid little slasher. Unfortunately, the actual product fell flat for me.
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