Spare a thought for the horror pseuds, folks like me who live to make strained sociopolitical interpretations of horror trends. The 21st century started off well for us, with the zombie revival and the torture wave mapping neatly onto post-9/11 anxieties. Why, though, is everything about exorcisms and possession all of a sudden? The fiftieth anniversary of a certain William Friedkin film explains some of it – not least David Gordon Green’s Exorcist: Believer – but what modern unease are these films tapping into?
We might be struggling, but if Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside is anything to go by, the films themselves are doing a good job answering the question. A possession story set amongst America’s Hindu diaspora, Dutta has cited a story his grandfather told him as the inspiration for the film. Apparently he made light fun of a family friend’s daughter’s habit of talking to an empty mason jar, much as one of the characters at the start of Dutta’s film does. The girl opened the jar and flung a handful of nothing at him, after which Dutta’s grandfather reported being beset by strange apparitions. In fleshing the anecdote out into a film, Dutta came across the pishacha, a demon from Indian folklore that feeds on negative energy.
If a film is going to have one really terrific act, it might as well be the last one.
As such, the pishacha in It Lives Inside makes a good call hanging around a high school, a place awash with negative energy. While this is likely to be the first film about a pishacha most Westerners have seen, It Lives Inside draws from a lot of familiar tropes as it folds bullying, culture clashes and other real-world issues into its genre narrative. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there is such a thing as a comforting horror story, even if that sounds like a contradiction in terms. It also shines a spotlight on how nimbly it avoids some expected areas, with Dutta acknowledging that his heroine Sam faces ignorance and racism occasionally, but not focusing on it. He’s more interested in Sam’s divided identity, torn between wanting to fit in at school and honouring her heritage. Her mother, played sensitively by Neeru Bajwa, knows her not as Sam but as Samidha, and this proves to be the kind of internal divide a demon can slip into.
I am wary of calling a new horror movie “slow burn” – it’s one of those apparently innocent terms like “elevated” which can cause fights to break out – but It Lives Inside takes its time to get into fifth gear. It can shine a bit too much of a spotlight on Dutta and his co-writer Ashish Mehta’s characterisation skills, which aren’t quite as sharp as they need to be for what is essentially a horror movie about W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness. Equally, the time isn’t wasted. It Lives Inside isn’t one of those horror movies that uses its slow build as a cudgel, to pummel you into taking it seriously. It’s made for multiplexes, and the final act proves Dutta can deliver on that level.
The last third of It Lives Inside has all the chanting and praying you’d expect from a movie about demonic possession, even if the chanting in question is heavier on “shanti” than the usual Latin. But it also reveals another subgenre the movie can claim to be part of. By the end, It Lives Inside is a full-on monster movie, with Todd Masters creating an utterly fabulous snarling, practical-effects demon to literalise the fears that have ran under the surface of the rest of the movie. Along with Megan Suri’s committed performance at Sam, it’s the best thing in the movie, and it leaves you on a delirious high. If a film is going to have one really terrific act, it might as well be the last one.
It Lives Inside is playing in UK Cinemas from
20th October courtesy of Vertigo Films
