There’s Someone Inside Your House Parent Guide

Jackson Pace (Markian Tarasiuk) is a star on the Osborne High School football team – that is, until he’s brutally murdered in his own home before a game. Then a mysterious text is sent out to everyone in town showing him beating a fellow player to a bloody pulp during an out-of-control hazing incident. And while the police are looking into the gruesome murder, another student is slaughtered in the church while setting up Jackson’s memorial service – and is revealed to have been behind a white supremacist podcast. For Makani Young (Sydney Park), there’s more at stake than her classmates’ lives: Makani also has a dark secret, one she’s very keen to keep hidden, the exact kind of secret the killer has been exposing. But with more murders on the way, secrets are going to be the least of her concerns…

Although that sounds like a fun premise for a horror flick, the majority of the film is spent with Makani smoking weed with a variety of people, making out with another student, and generally ruminating about her dark past. As you can imagine, that has some negative implications for the content grades in this film. Frequent underage drinking and drug use, along with some very gruesome violence, make this a poor choice for a teen audience.

This is also a remarkably familiar film, not significantly different in tone from other teen slashers like Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer. But back in the day, teenagers didn’t need to have some horrifying secret to get murdered by a masked maniac. Usually they were just having sex or wandering around in the wrong part of town. You wouldn’t catch Halloween’s Michael Myers dead going through some kid’s academic transcript for some juicy secret – he’ll just stab you for funsies. But now there has to be a reason – you know, apart from someone’s overriding interest in stabbing their classmates.

There’s Someone Inside Your House isn’t terrible as an example of the genre, but that’s not saying much, and nothing compensates for its abysmal content grades. If I’m going to sit through 90 minutes of teenagers getting butchered, I’d at least like the film to have more of a sense of humor about it – something like Freaky springs to mind. But as is, the only reason to stick around is to see how dramatically the next victim is going to get stabbed – and if that’s enough to keep you around, then I’m not watching movies with you.