Some of the best horror combines the terrifying with the absurd. In Midsommar, murderous country folk dance around maypoles. In Get Out, privileged white people are out to steal brains. In It Lives Inside, written and directed by Bishal Dutta, a desperate girl carries around an eldritch abomination in a jar.
It Lives Inside focuses on Samidha (Megan Suri), the rebellious teen daughter of Indian immigrants. Samidha, going by Sam, is torn between the desires of her traditional mother Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), and Sam’s own longing to fit in among the haughty, microaggression-slinging white kids at her school. While Sam struggles to carve out an identity for herself, her childhood friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) is dealing with a struggle of her own. Tamira, lately taken to wandering around the school muttering to herself, carries around a foul-looking jar of black sludge that she has to periodically feed bits of meat. Obviously, the habit makes her an absolute pariah among the other kids, and when Tamira comes to Sam for help, Sam—desperate to impress her newer, cooler friends—makes a terrible mistake.
The film is based on a demon from Hindu and Buddhist mythology, the pishach. In It Lives Inside, the pishach is a devourer of souls, tormenting its victims until they’re broken enough for the monster to feed on. After Sam turns her back on Tamira, she finds herself the pishach’s next target. As she’s plagued by increasingly terrifying apparitions, she’s aided by her friend Russ (Gage Marsh) and teacher Joyce (Betty Gabriel), but no one knows how to stop the creature, or even what exactly it is. Plus, once the pishach has its mind set on a victim, it’s willing to take out anyone who stands in its way.
It Lives Inside is the best kind of folk horror, plopping a mythological terror down in the real world and leaving it to its feeding frenzy. Instead of jump scares, It Lives Inside gives the audience long, lingering shots of the monster and its tracks—glittering eyes in a dark closet, a malevolent presence in school hallways—which mirror Sam’s own unraveling reality. As the movie goes on, Sam’s alienation becomes palpable, until she’s forced to turn to an unlikely source for help.
Unfortunately, It Lives Inside doesn’t quite break free of horror film clichés. Sam’s initial rebellion against her parents and culture set up an obvious solution for when she has to do a crash course on Hindu myth. The climactic battle drags a bit, with the monster getting less scary the more we see of it. Nevertheless, for Dutta’s first feature-length film, It Lives Inside is a fun, skin-crawling horror flick with a satisfyingly chilling conclusion. I can’t wait to see what Dutta comes up with next.
It Lives Inside comes out in theaters on September 22.
(featured image: Neon)
