Movie Reviews for Writers: They Live Inside Us

This review contains serious spoilers near the end. You've been warned. 

This little new horror gem might not be everyone's cup of tea (or red dyed corn syrup) but it's a pretty spry little thriller about widowed screenwriter Jake who feels all the ideas for good horror have been done to death and he therefore takes his daughter Dani to a famous haunted house (The Booth House) to get inspired for ideas for his new screenplay. That sounds like such a typical, paint by numbers horror movie, but trust me, this one says a lot more than just slash, stab, slash. It's also a feature film the director made based on a previous short (with the same title) he had created for his anthology The Witching Season.

The first lesson for writers in They Live Inside Us is that we all fear facing that empty page. When the ideas all seem done before and nothing is flowing, all that white space (either on screen on on actual paper) can be daunting. Jake fights that by having a notebook of movie monsters to stimulate ideas and what-ifs to at least get him writing. Some of us have notebooks of starting points and previous ideas and even sentence prompts, but having SOMETHING handy never hurts. 

The second lesson is that grief can affect your writing, and that's okay. Let it do its work in  you. I've covered grief for writers in my review of Shadowlands, so I won't repeat that here. (Just click the link to read that review.)

Next we cover what I feel is the main point of this awesome little film. As writers, we write what we want. Not we write what we want to, but we write what it is we actually want to either possess or to experience somewhere deep within us. Each one of Jake's potential plots feature a desperate woman who has lost her child, frantically running from various horror movie cliché killers (clowns, masked psychos, supernatural scarecrows, etc.). In the end, the woman is revealed to be his lost wife, and his child is revealed to be lost as well. Jake himself is revealed to be a ghost as well, going through his own loop of purgatory, and his plots are revealing the yearnings of his heart. 

He wants his family back together again, but he can't see them rightly because his own spirit isn't ready to face the truth yet. I won't reveal what that truth is (I'll save one spoiler left for you to discover on your own). 

Finally, I think the title, while taken at face value absolutely refers to the fact that the ghosts live inside the house, also doubles as a description of Jake the writer -- just as the ghosts of him, his wife, and his child live inside the Booth House, the stories that help him discover who he is and what he's ultimately looking for also live inside him. Fancy, deep stuff for an indie ghost story indeed. 

As a horror thriller, this one hits on all cylinders, and as a movie for writers, it's works very well too and packs a lot of punch. I'd highly recommend it.