When entering the yearly traditions of spooky season, everyone needs a scary movie to pair with their bowls of candy and pumpkin-spiced goods to fully fit in with October’s festivities.
One film to watch this October is “There’s Someone Inside Your House” a fun, partly faithful adaptation of Stephanie Perkins’ 2017 young adult horror novel of the same name. This slasher film was released on Netflix on Oct. 6 and is a goofy but chilling Halloween selection that even the tamest horror fans could stomach.
*SPOILERS BEWARE*
Directed by horror veteran Patrick Brice and produced by Hollywood heavyweights James Wan and Shawn Levy, the film has a lot of talent behind the scenes.
Like the novel, the film is set in the small Nebraska town of Osborne, where there’s little action outside of football and farming. Immediately, the audience is thrust into the story by witnessing a murder at the hands of a killer who wears masks that resemble the victims they’re about to kill. This element of confusion causes victims to have a brief and humorous “woah, is that me?” moment before meeting a gruesome, over-the-top demise.
The motive behind the killings is to expose students’ secrets to show that nobody in the town is as perfect as they seem. One of these revelations includes the murder of bubbly high school class president Katie, who secretly recorded a podcast episode with emphatic white supremacist views. Her dead body is displayed inside the local church, her racist podcast is played on a projector for the whole town to see.
The film stars Sydney Park, known as one of the stars of “Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists.” She plays Makani Young, a student who recently moved to Osborne from Hawaii. It’s clear that she came to Osborne to outrun some mysterious event from her past. Young has constant recurring visions of a traumatic event that led to her moving in with her grandmother, and she’s visibly afraid to reveal what she’s hiding to her friends.
While some murder mysteries go to great lengths to ensure everyone on set is shocked by the ultimate reveal, Park and her costars knew the identity of the masked killer from the very beginning. She said knowing their identity made filming a more interesting experience, as the cast were trying not to be too obvious to reveal who the killer was while leaving some hints.
“Yes, we definitely knew who the killer was from the start, which is really fun because I feel like you’re able to play with the dynamic in the scene,” Park said in a roundtable interview.
Besides going through a barrage of humorous horror tropes, the film is an effective parody of a small-town high school environment with cliques, a corny self-centered student body president and a close-knit community. There are a lot of interesting subplots going on within Young’s friend group as everyone has a shameful secret being held close to their chest.
There are lots of gags throughout the film, even when helpless characters are moments away from their demise, they crack funny lines that pair surprisingly well with shocking bits of violence and suspense. It’s not necessarily the first scary movie to go this route, but it takes meaningful inspiration from its predecessors. Think “Scream” but with less parody, more gore and more corn.
Much of the reason behind the film’s success as both a comedy and drama is the excellent chemistry between the cast. Park says the positive experience with her co-stars has carried over off-set.
“Me and the cast, we’ve been kicking it for a couple of years now. We filmed this [film] August 2019 and we’ve been inseparable ever since,” Park said in the roundtable. “Then we went into a pandemic and that really brought us closer together too, going through things collectively like that bonds you.”
Park said she really appreciated how her castmates made the effort to get to know each other, and that cast chemistry is essential for a film to run smoothly. She also says working on “There’s Someone Inside Your House” has been her favorite on-set experience thus far.
“You can always feel when the chemistry and the energy is just right,” Park said.
If there’s anything to learn from this film, it’s to not have any secrets or else someone will try to kill you for them, and that’s something I think we should live by. Or not. But life is funny regardless.
