Director/Screenplay – Bishal Dutta, Story – Bishal Dutta & Ashish Mehta, Producers – Raymond Mansfield & Sean McKittrick, Photography – Matthew Lynn, Music – Wesley Hughes, Visual Effects – Artifex Studios Ltd. (Supervisor – Rob Geddes), Atmosphere Visual Effects (Supervisor – Andrew Karr) & The VFX Cloud (Supervisor – Brett Keyes), Special Effects Supervisor – Jak Osmond, Makeup Effects – MastersFX, Production Design – Tyler Harron. Production Company – QC Entertainment/Brightlight Pictures.
Cast
Megan Suri (Samidha/Sam), Neeru Bajwa (Poorna), Betty Gabriel (Joyce), Mohana Krishnan (Tamira), Vik Sahay (Inesh), Gage Marsh (Russ), Beatrice Kitsos (Kittie), Janaya Ross (The Pishach)
Plot
Samidha or Sam is the teenage daughter of immigrant Indian parents. Sam’s mother Poorna is constantly pushing her to take part in Indian traditions, but Sam is more interested in assimilating into American culture. The other Indian girl at school is Sam’s former friend Tamira, who has become strange and withdrawn, and now always carries a mason jar about with her. Tamira then approaches Sam but in annoyance Sam smashes the jar, whereupon she sees Tamira dragged away by a force. In the aftermath, Sam finds Tamira’s diary and realises that she was haunted by The Pishach, a Hindu demon. The same Pishach now starts to target Sam.
East Indians make up 1.3 percent of the US population (some 4.4 million people) but are a group that seem underrepresented on screens. There is the very odd actor to emerge to some acclaim such as Dev Patel, Kal Penn, Mindy Kaling, Sendil Ramamurthy. On the creative side, the only name that stands out is M. Night Shyamalan, although all of his work has been in mainstream content away from Indian subject matters. In fact, the only US-made genre work with an Indian focus that comes to mind is the Blumhouse film Evil Eye (2020).
It Lives Inside – not to be confused with Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1974) or its sequel It Lives Again (1978) – represents one newcomer East Indian American voice in Bishal Dutta. Dutta stated that he wanted to make a film that draws from his own experience as a child of immigrants and his cultural backgrounds. The idea of the Pishach is an existing demonic figure that runs throughout Hindu and Buddhist mythology.
A terrified Sam (Megan Suri)
What should be said is that while Bishal Dutta clearly draws on his own cultural background and mythology, the rest of It Lives Inside feels like a film that is made by his other half – the culturally assimilated side, if you like. Cast it with a white girl and give the demon another name and It Lives Inside would be little different from an exceedingly traditional modern teen horror about someone being haunted after activating some type of curse – see the likes of Truth or Dare (2018), Countdown (2019), Polaroid (2019) and Tarot (2024) – the only real difference is that it would take away the film’s sole selling point, its’ claim to an Indian heritage.
Bishal Dutta draws on well-worn horror clichés – the discovery of the diary where the words trail off into someone having left disturbing drawings; while the emerged Pishach crawling through the house feels like someone has watched too many copies of Ring (1998). And one lost count of the number of times that Dutta threw in fake dream jumps – there were around three of them, which is three too many. It feels like a film made by someone amateurishly imitating the moves of other better works they have seen. By contrast, see Tumbbad (2018), an actual Indian-made work that does something quite extraordinary and original with its cultural themes.
