It Lives Inside

Well worth the price of admission! Happy to give it an eight out of 10. Great performance, great story, and a very unique creature.

Half of a good horror movie. Becomes a little tiresome towards the end but its not as bad as some people have been saying.

While I appreciate the themes posed in the first half about assimilation and the struggles of connecting with a culture you're both from but not connected to at all, It Lives Inside decides to squander this deep and interesting angle in favour of the most cookie cutter horror tropes and scares imaginable. Unable to fully throw its punches due to a very restrictive PG-13 rating, It Lives Inside drops back to a level of mediocrity which is almost insulting given the promise it sets out the gate. I think they really could have had something special here, a monster from a seldom represented culture in the horror space, with an underlying message about the pressures of first generation immigrants in their respective new homeland, attempting to both adhere to the expectations of the place they're growing up, while also trying to connect with the culture and customs of their parents. A shame really, sometimes knowing that something could have been great is worse than it just being bad, and I truly think It Lives Inside could have been special.

Like a sari made in China, it's Indian but not very original. Sari not sari.

It seems Indian mythology remains a rich, untapped playground for imaginative horror, so why does this movie content itself with an over-indulgence on dream sequences and extreme close-ups?

It was an ok movie. The demon was kind of cool and some of the kills were good but that was about all it had going for it.

Demons have no taste, turning down a tasty looking spread like that.

Lame entity, unscary, surface level culture themes, half-baked Indian folklore, horror tropes by the bucket and the story is uninteresting. It still manages to have a few moments of glory with the tension and a few scares. It looks good and the acting is pretty decent. The PG-13 rating seems to have been it's worst enemy, it's like it doesn't know when to kill a character off which is so frustrating. The stakes are low because of this. Also, it always breaks tension filled scenes with either a flashback or we visit another character meanwhile. ***It Lives Inside*** had it's moments but overall this was disappointing and generic.

I REALLY wanted to like this one, but it was aggressively mid for me. It felt like a very boiler plate demon movie but it had a good creature design and a thoughtful metaphor for the conflict between traditional culture and the pressure to assimilate.

Reminded me more of Under the Shadow, or even Drag Me to Hell, in that it was a fun way to teach people about demons from cultures underrepresented in Western media.

Really bummed out because I am always rooting for horror movies that aren’t part of a franchise with diverse casts/cultural backgrounds.

It's a fairly okay attempt at mixing Indianness to the American horror pedestal. If the sole idea here was to establish Megan Suri as a performer who can do the heavy-lifting, then it does the job. Since it's Halloween season, way too many indie horror films are coming out, and most of them struggle to stand apart, even when I constantly applaud the effort. In this case, the plot and its beats come across as mostly derivative, with inspirations drawn from several Asian and Hollywood horror flicks. The developments aren't startling, and I don't think it's particularly great for a horror film when you're able to predict the exact moment of each jumpscare. The creature effects also remind you of certain other films, including Rob Savage's recent The Boogeyman.

The screenplay doesn't try to build the lore around the demon all that much, as it's more interested in throwing jumpscares at you, one after the other. And when it does make mild attempts, the outcome ends up looking unintentionally funny (like, the whole cooking scene to summon the demon.. and, for what?). Megan Suri is good at emoting, but I wish the character had more texture. Sometimes, I found it hard to differentiate her from "just another high schooler". The boyfriend, the teacher, and every other supporting character were always meant to be predictable bait.

Evidently continuing my trend of religious horror this week, this new movie is fascinating in that it’s religious horror that is, for once, NOT based on Catholicism. I don’t want to say too much, because it does a nice job of slowly revealing the basis for what’s going on to those unfamiliar with Hinduism, but it all also circulates around a strong theme of assimilation versus cultural identity.