It’s a horror movie as examination on assimilation from an Indian-American standpoint and giving a different culture its own big screen boogeyman. It Lives Inside is about Samidha, a teenage Indian-American girl trying to fit in her suburban high school, which often involves her downplaying or abandoning her cultural roots and practices. She’s all but abandoned her childhood friend Tamira as an impediment to her social acceptance by the cool Caucasian kids. She then feels even more guilt when her friend goes missing and might be possessed by a demon of Hindu lore that feeds off negative energy (no wonder it’s targeting high school girls). This is the latest movie that uses the vehicle of horror to examine more personal themes, bringing a specific culture into the forefront and allowing wider audiences to learn from the horrors of trying to fit in when you feel different and ashamed for being different. As Samidha searches for her missing friend, she’s also forced to seek out help from her disapproving and more conservative mother, a woman steeped in her heritage. Where the movie left me wanting was in the exploration of its specific mythology as well as the development of the divide between mother and first-generation daughter. That’s the core of what can make this movie special, and yet what we get are more scenes of jump scare PG-13 terror and canoodling. It’s not a terribly scary movie, though the eventual creature design has some nicely unsettling angles. There’s one moment of hair floating that really unnerved me, but most of the movie falls on generic atmosphere effects. There are so many sequences of one high school English teacher working alone in the school (where is anyone else? Does this woman do nothing else?) and running through corridors as lights flicker and sinister sounds linger. By the end, It Lives Inside is an acceptable horror movie that would have benefited from spending more of its time on the perosnal elements that would have made it stand out rather than fit in with the horror crowd.

Nate’s Grade: B-