Stream It Or Skip It: ‘There’s Someone Inside Your House’ on Netflix, a Neo-Classical Teen Slasher That’s Slightly Smarter Than Most

WARNING: The title of Netflix movie There’s Someone Inside Your House only describes a scene or two. It is not a home-invasion thriller, but rather, a neo-classical slasher in which angsty teens — some of whom, in neo-classical slasher fashion, have sex with each other — try not to be on the receiving end of a large knife wielded by a homicidal maniac. So it’s kinda ’80s and kinda ’90s but definitely a product of the ’20s, a time when many attempts have been made to reanimate the genre. Let’s see if it’s successful.

THERE’S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Cold open: A lunk in a varsity jacket comes home to an empty house. It’s the night of a big game and he takes a nap and wakes up to find the front door wide open and his truck missing. TITLE CARD: Think someone’s inside his house? I bet someone’s inside his house. He soon finds a breadcrumb trail of incriminating pictures leading to his parents’ walk-in closet. There it is, in plain sight, irrefutable photographic evidence of him brutally hazing a fellow football player, who happens to be gay. And that’s when a lunatic in a hoodie and mask does not-nice things to the guy with a big-ass dagger. Cut to: the football field, where Caleb (Burkely Duffield), the hazee from the photos, dashes for a touchdown and looks up to see nobody cheering, because everyone in this small Nebraska town were just texted video of the now-dead bully bashing his face in.

The incident leaves the entire student body at Osborne High shaken, unless you’re one of the outcasts who sneer at toxic white males who play football and bully people who are different from them. Those outcasts probably understand that the guy doesn’t deserve to die and are scared because a killer is on the loose at the same time they experience snickering schadenfreude, because they’re complicated people: Makani (Sydney Park) is the new kid who recently moved from Hawaii. Darby (Jesse LaTourette) is the trans kid. Zach (Dale Whibley) is the high-on rebelling against the ruthlessly capitalistic practices of his very rich father. And Alex (Asjha Cooper) and Rodrigo (Diego Josef), well, there just isn’t enough time in a 90-minute slasher movie to give them rich inner lives, but they seem likeable enough, and besides, three kids does not a group of high-school rejects make.

After the killer strikes again, the Buffy Scooby Breakfast Club Chopper Bunch Gang figure out that he/she/it is targeting students with secrets — which doesn’t bode well for Makani, because we spend reasonably significant time with her, and learn that she’s hiding something crappy from her past. Alex is convinced the killer is Ollie (Theodore Pellerin), the outcast of outcasts who gives her bad vibes — “Yeah, you, all-in-black school-shooter style icon,” she snipes — but nobody knows that he and Makani have been secretly doing a lot more than just kissing. No, that’s not her crappy secret. But maybe what didn’t kill her made her strong enough to not get killed by the killer.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s Someone Inside Your House is very much of the Scream/I Know What You Did Last Summer mold — which means it also brings to mind the (overrated) Fear Street trilogy.

Performance Worth Watching: Park anchors the film with a sincere, sympathetic performance that helps save it from being an empty slaughtery knifey murderfest.

Memorable Dialogue: Alex knows she and her fellow outcasts gotta do what they gotta do, even if they don’t wanna: “All right — let’s go save the damn football team.”

Sex and Skin: The difference between ’80s slasher sex and ’20s slasher sex is, ’20s slasher sex is far less gratuitous.

Our Take: There’s Someone Inside Your House mixes snarky satirical tones with political commentary and earnest drama, and the result is an uneven but reasonably enjoyable 96 minutes. The fact that a slasher movie almost makes us give a shit about the well-being of its disposable-teen — in this case, not-quite-disposable-teen — characters feels like a minor miracle. I mean, every last dullard in Fear Street could have been gruesomely de-brained and my emo-meter never would’ve twitched.

Makani’s arc is far from profound, but bubbling beneath it is the potent idea that forgiveness is something we should embrace, that all humans are flawed and make mistakes, and maybe the killer’s actions are a metaphor for today’s “cancel culture,” which offers no nuance, context or deeper understanding for people whose mistakes are made public and results in the whole or partial destruction of their lives. (Eh — probably a stretch.) Or maybe it’s just funny to watch a hooded menace gut a kid outed as the anonymous host of a grotesque white supremacist podcast. There’s at least some modern societal contextual relevance to this movie, which foregoes making cheeky, winking film references for smarter things — e.g., a cracklingly funny scene in which the trans character is told their “inspirational” life story is going to be the subject of everybody’s college-application essays.

So the film is actively trying to be about things, and is not a meta-celebration of itself and its genre — and is therefore novel. At the same time, it adheres to many slasher tropes, and leads to a noisy conclusion in which the villain spends a lot of time talking when he/she/it should be killing, and isn’t that always the villain’s tragic hubristic downfall? I shrug in the general direction of the ending, but the rest of it generates enough narrative traction to maintain our interest. And for those of you who are here for the kills, well, the kills are damn killy, and even if they’re not innovative — knife meets body; repeat — for people who want kills, the movie is better than one without kills at all.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s Someone Inside Your House is a better-than-average slasher, which makes it stand out among the recent crop of Netflix horror outings. Consider our expectations just barely surpassed.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream There's Someone Inside Your House on Netflix