"There's Someone Inside Your House" Review: Could the Movie Outdo This Slasher Novel?
- Vega
- Oct 7, 2021
- 6 min read
Platform: Netflix
Release Date: October 6, 2021
When I moved to Asheville, North Carolina earlier this year, I compiled a few goals that I hoped to start meeting as a way of refreshing myself for this new beginning. I will just touch on the most relevant for this review, which was to read more novels. Comic books were already frequent visitors to my personal library as my limited attention span gives me permission to finish most of them and, when I do not finish something and put it down for a few months, comics are easy enough to pick right back up. Novels, on the other hand, did not come with those same benefits, and thus, I stayed far away from them until this past summer. With my handy dandy library card in hand, I made my way to the YA section where the books are no more than 400 pages, are full of intriguing thrillers and mysteries, and are full of stories likely to get adapted to a movie/series. Skipping over the first book I read, guess what book I randomly chose as my second go around the novel train..."There's Someone Inside Your House" (TSIYH). Oh yes, in a very rare, bluest of moon moments, I had read the book before seeing the movie and it was a very rewarding surprise to find that just a months later, Netflix would give the world a film adaptation. This allows me to do something a bit different with this review and not just explore the film on its own, but also provide some comparisons between it and the source material.
Guided by producers Shawn Levy ("Stranger Things") and James Wan ("Saw", "The Conjuring", "Insidious"), TSIYH is experienced from the view point of Makani Young (Sydney Park), who is adjusting to living with her grandmother in the rural town of Osborne, Nebraska after growing up in Hawaii. Along with finding her place amongst a group of friend, Alex (Asjha Cooper), Darby (Jesse LaTourette), Rodrigo (Diego Josef) and Zach (Dale Whibley), she even gets wrapped into a secret romantic connection with social outcast Ollie Larsson (Theodore Pellerin). Haunted by a nightmare from her past that she hopes to keep a secret, her worries are thrust into overdrive when students at her school are suddenly getting gruesomely murdered while having their darkest secrets revealed. Suspicions arise that Ollie, who had behavioral difficulties as a child, is behind the murders, with Makani eventually finding herself paranoid by this possibility. The killer, who wears a mask of the victims' face before killing them, makes a final stand at the town's annual festival and corn maze with a plan to frame Makani for all of the murders.
The movie is framed in the nature of a teen slasher, which is fitting considering it is based on a YA novel, but it fails to establish the most vital aspect of a teen slasher mystery: the characters and relationships. The plot is bogged down with empty kills and socially-charged topics and is void of the character depth needed to develop suspicions and build anticipation to the eventual reveal. I can respect the homage to the "suspect the boyfriend" trope highlighted by "Scream" and the rest of the 80's/90's slashers tropes that this Netflix original tried to emulate, but it lacked interesting storytelling built around the tropes and tried to turn the tropes into main story points. The movie took some classic slasher tropes and updated them for modern times. Traditionally slashers are built around sins/wrongdoings and those who engage in those instances are the ones targeted to die. For example, doing drugs and having sex were horror taboos that were likely to lead to death. But in TSIYH, sex and recreational drug use were much more accepted and, instead, modern taboos of social and racial stances were made into the targets for death.
Instead, there is a large focus on the motivations behind why certain students were chosen as victims, leading to an implicit commentary on a smorgasboard of SJW issues: LGBTQIA+ discrimination, white privilege, the Fentanyl epidemic, racism, etc. It is not necessarily the inclusion of these topics that was the problem, but that they did not contribute to the narrative at all. Instead of feeling like people, the characters ended up feeling like cheap cardboard cutouts of the socially-charged topic they represented. Even more, much of this information was centered around already dead characters, further leaving little development for the characters with which we are left. Rather, we follow around a crew of labels (the new kid, the outcast, the black friend, the gay friend, the trans friend, the rich friend) that are on screen just enough to participate in the usual teen hijinks. Ultimately, everyone feels like distant supporting characters who chew on the scenery enough to make their presence known, even Makani.
Diving into the source material from Stephanie Perkins' novel a bit more, the book was stylized much more as a teen slasher with no focus on the characters' identity labels. In fact, Makani, Alex, and Darby are primarily a trio in the book, as opposed to the larger friend group presented in the movie, and Ollie and Makani have a lot more of the "will they, won't they" dynamic for a good portion of the book. Of course, it is unfair to compare the character development of a movie with that of a book, but the book definitely had a better focus on who to develop as compared to the movie's lack thereof. The build up to Makani's secret was done much differently, starting with the killer's motivations having nothing to do with exposing others' secrets. In fact, only Makani was holding onto a secret in the book and the killer was nothing more than a hooded character who was motivated to kill students who desired to leave the town or those who did not belong there at all (which is where Makani fit in). There were no masks or exposures, which is an aspect I felt the movie did better than the book, but the movie took such an amateur approach to using those details. The details of Makani's secret were also improved for the film, with the book's version boiling down to a silly simple assault that did not carry the weight of its build-up in the slightest and was a real eye roller.
Circling back to the aforementioned "empty kills" of the film, it seemed to forget its own title and left the killer's MO from the book on the cutting room floor. Best demonstrated in the movie's opening kill, the killer would spend an extended time in many of the victims' homes before making himself known. This created a element of tension as events in Makani's home would eventually lead to realizing the killer had been doing things to mess with her. The assault on Makani provided one of the more exciting scenes as a naked Ollie has to save her and her grandmother shows up at the same time to assist, leading to the killer's reveal (whos was a completely different character with no identity issue backstory). That is not to say that there were not other kills of opportunity with less of that stalking element, but they made sense in the narrative by occuring after the killer's identity is revealed and is on the run.
Another MO the killer had in the book is leaving the body in some way that represents something about the victim, such as cutting off a religious victim's hands and leaving them in a praying motion. I think the concept that the filmmakers had for the killer was really interesting and had a lot of promise. That concept actually had me sure that the movie would slaughter the book by tying some of the book's themes together and bringing more intrigue and lore to the killer. Extrapolating Makani's concern about her secret and applying it to the overall theme of the film was really clever and, in my opinion, well needed to really lend credence to her concerns, which was loosely existent in the novel.
To sum up this review, I don't think the movie blew the novel away by any means, but it definitely carried itself much better in certain areas. If the concepts and lore from the movie were able to be melded to the pacing and characterizations of the novel, I think the end product would be the best version of this story. I am not opposed to shorter movies, but the 90 minutes of this one felt very rushed to an ending with that packs no punch and I think a big part of that rush was never having time to slow down with the characters. Being a horror fan makes you desensitized enough to the art of the kill, but constantly being rushed into a new one made it hard to enjoy deaths like the sequence in the confession booth. This was about as average of a teen slasher as you can get and while it was a fine weeknight watch, I would not recommend spending time on it if you have something else ready on the docket.
RATING: 👺 👺.5 / 5
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