On Netflix now, It’s What’s Inside is the latest film to throw anxious young people in a mansion. A look at the rise and meaning behind the stately home horror subgenre:
As screenwriting instructor Dov Simens once said, there’s a common approach to making a direct independent movie: “you take 12 actors to a house and chop them up.”
It’s a formula that has worked handsomely for such filmmakers as Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) and Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs) well. It’s also a pattern followed by a more recent, slightly unusual subgenre that I’m going to call “stately home horror.”
The most recent example of a small yet growing subgenre is It’s What’s Inside, writer-director Greg Jardin’s horror-comedy that made its Netflix debut on the 4th October. Shot on a budget of $2.5m, it’s a likeably warped little movie that takes in betrayal, infidelity, jealousy, and unsafe sex – all shot with off-kilter brio by Jardin, who also edits.
Young-ish couple Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and Cyrus (James Morosini) provide a vantage point for the ensuing mayhem. In the middle of working through their own dysfunctional relationship – Cyrus appears to be addicted to internet porn – the pair are invited to a wedding at their old school friend’s sprawling country estate. That friend, Reuben (Devon Terrell) is a bit of a party animal, and so he’s arranged to have one final drink-and-weed-fuelled bash with his friends on the night before he’s due to get hitched.
When Shelby and Cyrus arrive at their friend’s enormous house – inherited from his late mother, who was an avant garde artist – they catch up with other former students they haven’t seen in years. There’s ominous talk about another party that went wrong a few years earlier, which provides a hint that there might be some dark secrets floating around among the group. All of which comes roiling back to the surface when another ex-student, the eccentric Forbes (David W Thompson) walks through the door clutching a suitcase.
Inside the suitcase is some form of experimental device which allows its users to essentially switch bodies. (“If you think of your brain as a hard drive, this just swaps the files,” Forbes explains.) By now thoroughly high on drink and drugs, the friends agree to Forbes’ suggestion that they use the device to play a high-tech, ill-advised variation on the parlour game, Mafia – the group has to work out which personality is in which body. If a player correctly guesses who’s lurking in a particular body, that person is out of the game; if a player guesses wrong, then they’re disqualified.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Mafia (also known as Werewolves) also forms the basis of the hit reality TV series The Traitors, in which players have to figure out who’s a ‘Faithful’ and who’s been secretly invited to join the ranks of the titular ‘Traitors’. Much like that series, the game in It’s What’s Inside has a corrosive effect on everyone who plays, as their old rivalries, resentments and prejudices are brought to the fore.
Jardin’s film has numerous – most likely coincidental – parallels with another recent horror comedy: 2022’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, directed by Halina Reijn. Again, it’s about a bunch of 20-somethings who convene at a wealthy friend’s mansion, get drunk and/or high, and agree to play a parlour game. In this case, it’s the titular Bodies Bodies Bodies, where one player’s assigned the role of ‘murderer’ and the rest have to work out that person’s identity.
As in It’s What’s Inside, the game in Bodies Bodies Bodies provides a flashpoint for the group’s previously buried grievances, and when one of their friends is found dead, the in-fighting and finger-pointing grows to (literally and figuratively) hysterical levels.
The mansion or stately home has provided the backdrop for tales of murder and suspicion in everything from the earliest gothic novels – like Horace Walpole’s influential but largely-forgotten-these-days The Castle Of Otranto – to Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries to contemporary horror films like Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) and its 1999 remake.
In Bodies Bodies Bodies and It’s What’s Inside, however, the country retreat appears to represent something else: the growing division between those who actually own their own home and the millions of younger people who can’t afford to get their foot on the housing ladder. Whether they consciously intended it to or not, the writers have tapped into the reality that, not only are younger people less well off than the Baby Boomer generation, but the wealth disparity between average millennials and the richest 10 percent of the same cohort has actually grown – largely because the wealthiest of them have inherited properties or large sums of money from their families.
Other concerns that are commonly attributed to younger millennials or Generation Z emerge in both movies: the endless feeling of being watched and judged, not least because of the ubiquity of social media. It’s telling that both movies feature a character who’s internet famous in some way; in It’s What’s Inside, we get Alycia Debnam-Carey’s Nikki, who makes relationship advice videos on Instagram. In Bodies Bodies Bodies, it’s Rachel Sennott’s Alice, who’s a podcaster. In this context, they’re the digital hustlers trying to get ahead.
Both films explore and not so subtly lampoon a generation’s desire for validation among their peers, a reliance on mobile phone technology, and the gut-wrenching feeling of being harshly judged or outright rejected. It’s a vague sense of paranoia that really comes to the fore in 2021’s comedy horror, All My Friends Hate Me.
You’ll probably have guessed at the premise already: a group of friends convene at a country estate belonging to the indescribably wealthy family of the upper-crust George (Joshua McGuire). The guest of honour, at least in theory, is the socially awkward Pete (Tom Stourton), though there’s the constant, overweening sense that something weird’s going on. Who’s this strange older guy, Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), and why has he bought a goose with him? Are they really there to celebrate his birthday, or is there something more sinister afoot?
Directed by Andrew Gaynord and written by Tom Palmer and Tom Sourton, All My Friends Hate Me is remarkably of a piece with the other two films discussed so far, even if it’s set in rainy Britain rather than the US. Its cast of characters are also former university or college friends who’ve found themselves in a later, more responsible stage of their lives; like It’s What’s Inside’s Shelby and Cyrus, All My Friends Hate Me’s Pete and Sonia (Charly Clive) are a couple who are thinking about getting married. It’s also about guilty consciences and barely-concealed resentments, and the terror of being shamed or ostracised by friends.
Because it’s a British film, the gulf between classes is even more glaring in All My Friends Hate Me. The country home and all the trappings that come with it – Land Rovers, waxed jackets, blasting pheasants out of the sky with shotguns – are all presented not as things to aspire to, but as a foreign territory that can be visited but never truly inhabited.
Looking back, it’s possible to see traces of the stately home horror subgenre’s lineage. In 2011 came You’re Next, a blackly comic slasher in which a chilly family reunion in a Missouri country retreat is interrupted by a gang of killers in animal masks. Although less pointed in its examination of generational anxieties than the films discussed so far, it does – without spoiling things – touch on the subject of inherited wealth.
Eight years later, along came directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready Or Not, a magnificently full-blooded comedy horror about deadly games at a country house. We’re introduced to Grace (Samara Weaving), a working-class woman who’s about to marry Alex (Mark O’Brien) who happens to be a member of the wealthy Le Domas family, which at some point decades earlier had made its fortune by selling board games. The wedding takes place at the Le Domas ancestral home, after which the family invite Grace to join a long-held tradition: play an innocent-sounding after dinner game.
It’s notable that games commonly lie at the heart of these stately home horror movies. Even in All My Friends Hate Me, it’s clear that some kind of game is going on, with Peter at the centre and everyone privy to the rules except him.
Put it all together, and you have a warped portrait of 21st century society as a particularly cruel zero-sum game. As in real life, for every one member of the millennial or Gen-Z cohort who owns a house and has savings in their bank account, there are at least 10 people from the same generation who live with parents and struggle to build a future for themselves.
It’s the kind of uncertainty and despair that found its most ferocious voice in Netflix series Squid Game, in which the path to wealth was literally a game of life or death survival. In movies like It’s What’s Inside and Bodies Bodies Bodies, the same sentiment is less prominent but still there, like a background static.
These movies capture the sense that, for all the benefits of the 21st century – greater self-awareness, awareness of gender issues, mental health and so on – something is also going desperately wrong at the same time. The wealth gap is widening, and nobody knows exactly what to do about it. All we can do is play the game and hope we’ll be one of the lucky winners.
It’s What’s Inside is on Netflix now.
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