Review: There’s Someone Inside Your House Is a Scream for Our Cancel Culture Era

Ever since the teenage characters from Wes Craven’s Scream coolly pontificated on the who- and whydunits of a murderous spree in their picturesque hamlet of Woodsboro, the slasher film has taken a marked turn toward ironic self-reflexivity. Now, 25 years and scores of imitators later, Patrick Brice’s There’s Someone Inside Your House makes no bones about its intentions as a direct homage to that Kevin Williamson-penned classic.

Case in point, the film is set in a familiar-looking rural American town where a knife-wielding masked killer is on the loose and the savvy high school students are only too happy to gab about the potential suspects and the thrill of living in their own horror movie. But the ultra-hip and timely twist here is that the killer is motivated by cancel culture, offing kids who have skeletons lurking in their closets—or in the history of their social media feeds.

In an opening sequence that invokes the memory of Scream’s still-shocking opening set piece, an aggressive football bro, Jackson Pace (Markian Tarasiuk), meets his demise at his rural Nebraska home after being confronted with the photographic evidence of his violent hazing of a gay teammate. Next up is the virtue-signalling student body president, Katie Koons (Sarah Dugdale), who has a long-deleted white nationalist podcast called “Your Daily Ethnic Cleanse” to atone for. These transgressions are also made public by the killer, whose masks are 3D-printed replicas of the victims’ faces, leading everyone in school to frantically reconsider their past behavior in order to ascertain whether their time of judgment has arrived.

For a while, Brice attacks this material in an incisively entertaining, if somewhat derivative, fashion. Despite the film’s continued reliance on narrative parallels to Scream, the diverse young cast is likeable and the overlaying of a progressive Gen-Z ethos on otherwise dated genre tropes is refreshing. Brice has fun giving the typical high school rumour mill a distressingly deadly makeover, with the student body eventually throwing a confidential get-together in which they can share all of their dirty little secrets in order to hopefully avoid becoming the next victim. It’s an amusing callback to the virginity-losing party from Cherry Falls, one of the best post-Scream riffs, while setting up the juicy proposition of whether everyone’s personal shames are worth keeping hidden at the potential expense of their lives.

Yet it’s at this point that the social satire of There’s Someone Inside Your House starts to fall apart, as the “secrets” that the killer’s targets harbor begin to increasingly muddle the overall thesis of Henry Gayden’s script with each subsequent stab of the knife. The way the filmmakers see it, someone quietly suffering from drug addiction is worthy of the same bloody end as someone who’s privately spouted racist or homophobic vitriol.

Makani Young (Sydney Park), for her part, is signalled as having the biggest secrets to hide, including a criminal past that she outran geographically but not psychologically, positioning her as the final girl. But even once her misdeeds are divulged in full, they’re weirdly benign and entirely understandable considering the context of the situation which bred them. Is this calling into question the killer’s motivations and their skewed perception of what cancel culture really is? Perhaps, but the filmmakers don’t take the risk of adequate exploration.

By not allowing all of its protagonists to face legitimately complicated ethical dilemmas, There’s Someone Inside Your House ultimately feels like a missed opportunity to interrogate society’s fervent need to make pariahs out of people for past mistakes. And as if aware of the script’s flimsy commitment to its themes, Brice, whose Creep movies certainly demonstrated the courage of his convictions, dials up the film’s slasher thrills as one teen after another is killed simply for having some kind of secret. By the time the toothless reveal rolls around, accompanied by a heap of confusing expositional justification, you may wish that the film, like Craven’s horror touchstone, had gone for the jugular in more ways than just literally.