Review: 'There's Someone Inside Your House' perfect slasher to kick off spooky season

Courtesy of Netflix

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Between the “Fear Street” trilogy and now “There’s Someone Inside Your House,’ Netflix is reviving the slasher genre with style and relevance. “There’s Someone Inside Your House” mocks the slasher genre while pushing itself away from the ‘90s era inspirations of “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (obviously their imprints are still felt), firmly planting its ideologies in the present day. Those who appreciate bad slashers (guilty as charged) won’t be surprised at how much they’ll enjoy “House,” but this one isn’t quite as terrible as you’d think. The kills are gnarly, subtextual tongue-and-cheek humor earns big laughs (before a teen is given a knife to the chest they plead: “Can I Venmo you?”) and it’s a perfect, mindless horror film to usher in the spooky season.

Directed by Patrick Brice, with a producing team featuring Shawn Levy (“Stranger Things”) and James Wan (“The Conjuring”), it’s no shocker “There’s Someone Inside Your House” feels smarter and more self-aware than the average teenage splatterfest. In this instance, the killer has concrete motives for choosing their victims: each one has an underlying secret that if revealed would either get them cancelled or thrown in jail. The killer also crafts their mask to resemble whomever is next on the chopping block, a slick metaphor about how our choices are the ones that’ll eventually kill us.

Taking over scream queen and final girl status is Makani (Sydney Park) who’s recently relocated to small-town Nebraska from Hawaii. Thrown into a whirlwind of chaos as the school reels from the murder of the star football player in the opening scene, Makani, along with a group of nameless faces and obvious targets, go down a rabbit hole trying to stop their classmates from getting slaughtered. In between, the script, by Henry Gayden based on the book by Stephanie Perkins, throws in conversations around cancel culture, gender pronouns, and even defunding the police. Some might argue that wokeness has no business in a slasher movie, but for “There’s Someone Inside Your House,” it’s a refreshing dose of realism amid silly, over-the-top, horror shenanigans.

There’s plenty of suspicious characters maneuvering in and out of the movie (including the residential Lyft driver) who could be the killer, but the real thrill Brice and company cook-up lie in the tension stirred from the unknown stalker lurking in the cornfields. Speaking of which, the finale is set in a cornfield, fostering one of the better climatic hoedowns of late, even if you can pinpoint the big reveal before it happens. (Nebraska, amirite?) Plenty of gore and several thrilling chases ensue during the film’s slasher-friendly 94 minutes, seldomly losing momentum for mindless character subplots or unnecessary teenage jargon (the obligatory sex scene, however, remains untouched). Let’s hope “There’s Someone Inside Your House” continues this trend of solid teenage thrillers for the foreseeable future, because this was a blast.

Grade: B

THERE'S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE debuts on Netflix, Wednesday October 6th.