There's Someone Inside Your House, And There Was A Freaky Slasher Movie Inside Netflix's Top 10

It's strange to think now that only 12 years elapsed between Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" at the height of the '80s slasher craze and the director's cheeky meta-statement on the genre, "Scream." The stalk 'n' slash format was still relatively new in horror terms, but its popularity ballooned so quickly and derivatively that the tropes were ripe for the picking, which Craven did so joyously balancing nostalgia for the '80s glory days of Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Freddy Krueger with clever subversion of the familiar beats.

Almost three decades after Drew Barrymore's fatal phone call, modern slashers still owe a debt to Craven's genre-redefining classic. The "Scream" series has since fallen prey to sequelitis, increasingly resembling the movies it so deftly and playfully mocked originally, and we've had endless remakes and reboots from "Halloween" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" to lesser lights like "Sorority Row" and "Slumber Party Massacre." Meanwhile, filmmakers have often tried to recapture the knowing meta slant of Craven's original takedown of the genre, with very mixed results. "Happy Death Day" cleverly added a "Groundhog Day" element to the horror, while Netflix's "Fear Street" trilogy was so busy paying homage to the maniacs of yore that it forgot to add anything really innovative to the proceedings. One of my favorites is "The Final Girls," which built its homage to '80s thrills and kills around a surprisingly touching mother-daughter relationship.

Against this backdrop of 21st-century slashers, we also have "There's Someone Inside Your House," Patrick Brice's take on the young adult novel of the same name. It has been skulking around on Netflix since 2021, but last week managed to crack the streaming platform's Top 10 movies. So what is it all about, and is it worth your time? 

"There's Someone Inside Your House" starts out with obnoxious high school football player Jackson Pace (Markian Tarasiuk) heading home to take a nap before a big game. When he wakes up, he fearfully realizes that there is indeed someone inside his house, plastering the joint with incriminating photos of him beating up a gay teammate during a hazing session. The intruder isn't just intent on exposing his shameful behavior, however. Wearing a 3D-printed mask of Jackson's face, they stab him to death before sending footage to everyone in the school.

The next day, Jackson's fellow jocks are grieving his brutal murder. Less so are a group of misfits who form their own snarky little circle: Makani (Sydney Park), a seemingly normal girl who moved from Hawaii to live with her grandma; Alex (Asjha Cooper), the group's "resident b****;" Zach (Dale Whibley), a pot-smoking rich kid who hates his wealthy dad; Darby (Jesse LaTourette), a non-gender-conforming student who dreams of working for NASA; and Rodrigo (Diego Josef), who hides his painkiller addiction from his friends. Lurking around the outside is Ollie (Théodore Pellerin), a loner who everyone immediately marks as the prime suspect.

It's not long before the killer chalks up their next victim: Katie (Sarah Dugdale), the goody-two-shoes school president who the murderer slices and dices while revealing her involvement on a white supremacist podcast. The killer's M.O. is clear: They prey on people with secrets that could see them canceled if the murderer wasn't permanently canceling them with a big knife instead. 

As the police impose a curfew, Zach throws a big party for everyone to share their secrets, theoretically denying any hold the killer has on them. But Makani is still wary of revealing why she left Hawaii for a small town in Nebraska ...

With its small-town high school setting and guilty secrets, "Scream" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" are the most obvious points of reference for "There's Someone Inside Your House," and the screenplay from Henry Gayden ("Shazam!") tentatively nods to both movies. Wes Craven's classic looms especially large over the cold open, which inverts the beginning of "Scream" and stands out as the best scene in the movie. Instead of an innocent babysitter meeting a grisly end, Jackson Pace is a despicable character facing a reckoning at the hands of a masked killer who knows where all the bodies are buried. It's a decent setup, especially with the gimmick of the 3D-printed mask, and contains a neat irony that the guy Jackson was tormenting has his moment of glory on the football field go unnoticed as everyone is too busy looking at the incriminating evidence on their phones.

The movie rapidly goes downhill from there, largely because director Patrick Brice, who made his name with the "Creep" movies, seems almost apologetic about helming a slasher. He shows little aptitude or patience for staging the kills, substituting lashings of gore for tension or scares. At times, it's as if he would rather skip the horror part altogether and get straight back to the bland high school teen drama, which is undercooked at best. I haven't read the book so it might be the fault of the screenwriting, but all too often the film feels a little desperate to be as edgy and relevant as possible for its target audience. Most damagingly, "There's Someone Inside Your House" forgets one crucial factor: Slashers are meant to be fun.

Ultimately, "There's Someone Inside Your House" falters because it's too busy trying to be on the pulse instead of ensuring it delivers a good time. That's not to say horror movies of this kind can't have a basis in the real world: Slashers have always touched upon issues faced by young adults, particularly women who do much of the showpiece screaming and dying in the genre. Almost 50 years ago, Bob Clarke's seminal "Black Christmas" was ahead of its time with its handling of abortion and toxic masculinity; the wave of slashers that followed "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" also introduced the weirdly puritanical "sex equals death" motif that "Scream" targeted so well. So there is nothing wrong with updating the stalk 'n' slash format for the Zoomer generation, but it feels a little disingenuous how it is treated as a box-ticking exercise here.

Beyond that, many of the film's problems come down to a disjointed screenplay that bungles a straightforward slasher plot and leaves characters thinly drawn even by the standards of the genre. It even manages to turn the movie's only original gimmick, the 3D-printed masks, into a heavy-handed metaphor for the hypocrisy and secrecy of the teens. Rather than becoming more unhinged and exciting as we reach the conclusion, the film takes on a strangely preachy tone, as if the filmmakers are convinced that they're making some big statement on contemporary teenage life.

For all its hot-button topics, "There's Someone Inside Your House" feels like a throwback to the slasher also-rans that were ten-a-penny in the '80s and in the wake of "Scream." We've perhaps yet to see the next defining step in the evolution of the slasher and we can't expect every movie to reinvent the wheel, but this meek and tedious film feels like a giant step backward.