The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
I feel like I review this movie five or six times a year. The feature film debut of Indian American director Bishal Dutta, It Lives Inside attempts to inject horror characters from Hindu and Buddhist mythologies into modern horror. That’s not a bad idea and could introduce a new slate of villains into the genre. Unfortunately, it turns out that there is very little difference between Indian demons and American demons. Despite its attempts at cultural infusion, It Lives Inside has little to add to the genre and is beholden to every trope and cliché that has turned modern horror films into tests of patience. This is basically just The Boogeyman from earlier this year, but with fewer white people and I’m not young enough to think that automatically makes it brilliant.
Our lead is Samidha, who goes by the Americanized “Sam,” a teenaged girl of Indian descent that is trying to balance her assimilation into American society with her parents’ desire for her to embrace Indian culture. Sam’s former best friend Tamira, also of Indian heritage, has become a social outcast that awkwardly carries a jar around with her everywhere she goes. Tamira claims that the jar contains a demon that will be set free if the jar is ever broken. The two girls have a confrontation, the jar is broken and the demon is released. Its eventually revealed that the demon is a Pishach, a Hindu monster that feeds off of negative energy and can only be stopped by being trapped in a vessel of some sort.
I’m sure that much will be written about the cultural identity text of the film, as much of it deals with Sam’s struggle to reconcile her cultural heritage with the culture of her present-day surroundings and the familial pressure that comes with that. I’m sure that people will talk about how this is a meditation on the conceptual challenges of the American dream. I’m sure that a thesis will be written about how the demon represents one’s true identity and that one risks social ostracization by embracing that identity. It would be an obvious choice as a horror movie to show at some sort of DEI event on a college campus (for those that don’t work in higher education or human resources, DEI stands for “diversity, equity and inclusion”).
That’s all fine and well, but the problem is that the movie just isn’t any good. It turns out that dissimilar cultures can overcome our differences and manage to make remarkably similar and shitty horror movies. With two major wars raging in the world right now, maybe this is the exact message that we need. Maybe It Lives Inside will be the film that brings humanity together and unites us in peace as we realize that our differences amount to very little when we can all manage to make the same lame jump-scare movies. Maybe this is the film equivalent of Bill & Ted uniting the world through music.
Or it could just be another lame horror movie in a long string of lame horror movies over the last decade. Other than the aforementioned The Boogeyman, this also reminded me of Smile, Come Play, Lights Out, Friend Request, Countdown, Slender Man and probably a dozen more that I can’t think of off the top of my head. Beneath the thin veil of academic ambition, this is just another PG-13 jump scare movie about a demon/ghost haunting an object/area and killing a few teenagers in the tamest way possible. We again have the idea of a curse/monster being passed between people like a virus. We again have this framework being used to convey a social issue (this time being cultural identity instead of mental health, bullying, etc.). This is the basic blueprint for modern horror: Take a trending social issue that Gen-Z is obsessed with (or that Gen-X thinks they are obsessed with), turn the issue into a literal monster and somehow make it viral. There is nothing new here and certainly nothing scary. It is just another lame monster jumping out and going “boo!” I’m exhausted by this, honestly.
The only positive is the strong performances that deserve better material. In particular, Megan Suri is fantastic as the lead. She gives a refreshingly deep and sympathetic performance that thankfully makes the character (and, to a lesser extent, the movie) more watchable than some of the other movies that I mentioned. Mohana Krishnan is also great in a supporting role as Tamira and brings a sense of dread to the cliché idea of a viral curse/monster. At the least, these actors bring an ominous feeling to the movie, at least in early scenes, but this is unfortunately squandered by a paint-by-numbers script.
The horror films of each decade have a different feel and tone to them and I hope that It Lives Inside is one of the final remnants of the boring garbage that dominated the 2010s. For the love of god, it’s 2023. Can we please move on to a different formula? The 2020s haven’t established a separate style yet, but I beg for the “social commentary as viral monster” trend to end or at least give it a different tone or style (Dawn of the Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Thing also broadly fit this mold, but they are also all very different and very visceral films). I’m happy to leave films like It Lives Inside in the past.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Lives_Inside#/media/File:It_Lives_Inside_2023_poster.jpg
