Netflix’s novel adaptation No One Gets Out Alive, There’s Someone Inside Your House is adapted from a critically-acclaimed book. However, the teen slasher takes as much inspiration from earlier genre outings as it does its literary source material.
From the opening scene onwards, There’s Someone Inside Your House references numerous horror classics in ways both subtle and obvious. Few viewers familiar with the slasher subgenre will miss the playful nod to Hostel is much more likely to go over the heads of more casual viewers. Luckily, a close rewatch can uncover most of these references.
Among the movies referenced are the classic ‘80s slasher The Burning, the ‘90s meta-slasher Stephen King adaptation Children of the Corn. The slasher’s brief runtime doesn’t stop it from managing to offer a whistle-stop tour of recent genre history, meaning a pretty detailed breakdown is required to uncover every reference featured throughout There’s Someone Inside Your House’s action. First of all, there are the many nods to the classic slasher that rewrote the rules of the subgenre, Wes Craven’s Scream.
Scream
No one could fault There’s Someone Inside Your House for featuring more than its fair share of Scream riffs when the 1996 slasher featured a plethora of horror movie references of its own. The way that early victim Katie’s corpse is strung up calls to mind the gruesome ordeal suffered by Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker in Scream’s legendary opening. However, that’s just one of many Scream 4’s villain, and the teen characters throw a house party despite the murders with another killing inevitably occurring there.
The Burning
Makani’s backstory is teased throughout There’s Someone Inside Your House, and the eventual reveal is similar to the killer’s backstory in 1981's The Burning. A gory slasher, The Burning was one of the earliest summer camp horrors intended to capitalize on slasher Jason Voorhees drowned in Camp Crystal Lake, this movie’s killer Cropsy was badly burned when a prank went too far. That’s also what happened to Jasmine in Makani’s There’s Someone Inside Your House's backstory, with the protagonist accidentally pushing her into a bonfire during a hazing prank that got very out of hand. Luckily, Jasmine is just a red herring and not the movie’s killer.
Sorority Row
Sorority Row did not earn a lot of critical love when it was released in 2009, but the slasher remake has since been regarded as one of the late ‘00s better offerings. A gory, R-rated affair, Sorority Row was a remake of 1982’s The House On Sorority Row that significantly upped the original’s violence. The brutal horror features an extended sequence where the masked slasher villain stalks a victim through a crowded house party and manages to kill them but evades capture despite the number of onlookers, an idea There’s Someone Inside Your House re-stages about halfway through the story. The movie's killer uses the dark of night to cover their tracks where Sorority Row’s villain makes use of the party’s convenient foam to obscure themselves, but otherwise, the sequence owes a lot to the earlier slasher.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Arguably the most obvious slasher reference in There’s Someone Inside Your House comes at the beginning of the aforementioned party sequence, wherein characters share their secrets to ensure the killer has less ammunition to use against them. In an ironic nod to slasher movie history, Alex jokingly claims she ran over a hitchhiker and hid his body a year earlier, but implies this was no big deal and was worth discussing. This is a reference to 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer, wherein the teen protagonists accidentally kill a man on the road and hide the body instead of alerting the authorities, resulting in a shadowy figure hunting them down a year later. It is also a slightly ironic joke, as Makani did secretly injure someone by accident in her backstory, but the character she hurt has nothing to do with the masked killer hunting down her classmates.
Hostel
One of the more subtle (yet nasty) nods to horror history found in There’s Someone Inside Your House occurs during the opening scene’s killing. The Quentin Tarantino-produced Hostel features an infamously disturbing scene wherein a hapless victim’s Achilles tendons are slashed, rendering him unable to escape his captor. The stomach-churning shot of his open ankle is recreated when the first victim of There’s Someone Inside Your House - the boorish jock Jackson - enters a walk-in closet and almost immediately has the backs of his legs slit open from below. It is an idea just as gross upon a revisit as it was in Roth’s film, and easily one of There’s Someone Inside Your House’s most memorable kills.
Children of the Corn
The closing scenes of There’s Someone Inside Your House take place in a cornfield where the killer is stalking victims through the rows, but the scene also hides a reference to horror legend Stephen King’s recently-remade Children of the Corn. When the villain opts to burn down the field, they do so by pouring a trail of gasoline through the rows and igniting it, much like the heroes of Children of the Corn do to escape the endless maze at the climax of the ‘80s cult favorite. Both Children of the Corn and There’s Someone Inside Your House close on their heroes exiting blazing cornfields, secrets finally brought to light by burning down the rural hiding place.
