Naty's Spooky Corner

There's Someone Inside Your House

★★★★★

Sunday, November 7, 2021, 11:11 PM

You better lock your doors and hide your kids cause I'm going to be ranting about this movie.

TSIYH is a 2021 horror slasher film based on the novel by the same name written by Stephanie Perkins (which sadly, I have not read yet….yet.) This film was directed by Patrick Brice and stars Sydney Park, Theodore Pellerin, Asjha Cooper, and others, and was even produced by the great James Wan! And for all my book nerds, there are no spoilers if you choose to see the movie first since there were some significant changes made to the plot.

The story is centered around Makani Young, a high-school student struggling to adjust to her new life in a small Nebraska town after being sent away from her family in Hawaii. Makani has a steady group of seemingly awesome friends, Darby, Rodrigo, and Zach and even a love interest (???? Spicy!) but has more than a couple of skeletons hanging in her closet that she’s desperately hiding. Terror quickly strikes the town when a series of random killings begin, targeting well known students in her high school who are all hoarding a secret. Makani along with her friends become the targets to a killer who hides behind a 3D mask of their intended victims and who is hellbent on bringing everyone’s secrets to light.

Remember to lock your door before reading the spoilers ahead:

A major theme in this film is centered around privilege and the wealth disparity between Zach Sandford and basically the rest of the students at the small town high school. Zach himself is initially presented as being a burn-out student, purposefully failing in his classes to cause further disappointment to his Machiavellian father who is trying to rule the town by amassing power, land, and wealth. Later during the big reveal of the film, we discover that Zach is in fact the killer, and that the true motive behind his killing spree was not just to unveil the secrets within their small town, but to kill his father for being such a horrible person and for forcing him(?) to live with privilege and unattainably high expectations. (Which is understandable, since he did suck quite a bit).

There are a couple of interesting takes that could be made from this portrayal. To start, the message that I received from the film was that although it would be nice to have a wealthy and privileged life, it ultimately creates sociopathic characters, isolated from everyday society. Both Zach and his father are similar in their complete disregard towards the livelihood of others, although to very different extents, causing them both to be villains in their own regard. While having this be a motivator for the other deaths that we see is flimsy at best, I chose to see it as Zach perfecting his mark by targeting other students and throwing people off the real target, his shitty father. Which, if intentional, would have been a smart move, since one of the victims was his supposed close friend, Rodrigo, and what kind of psychopath kills their own friend just for being addicted to opioids? Apparently this asshole.

Another interesting change that happened within the film is that Caleb, one of the football players is written as being gay. And while he is a minor character within the film, this identifier was used as justification for his extreme hazing by the football team, specifically at the hands of Jackson Pace, who is later killed for his transgressions. There isn’t much else that we see from Caleb other than a few interactions with the core friend group. Even when the killer targets Caleb as well, we as an audience do not know what additional secret he was hiding, which essentially boils him down as being nothing more than the token gay character within the film...which is kinda icky. I thought we were part using minorities of any regard as a token character, but I guess not.

Overall, I thought there were enough interesting kill scenes to make this movie enticing. Personally, slasher films are not my favorite so I may have some bias towards my rating of this film. Was this a good thoughtless horror movie to pass the time? Yeah, it was pretty alright. Would I ever consider watching it again? Hard pass on that one. This movie was trying and failing to be woke way too many times to warrant that...

Kill Scene Ratings: 4/5
Wholesome Grandma Scenes: 5/5

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