IT LIVES INSIDE: Official Poster Out Now, In Cinemas This September

Sam is desperate to fit in at school, rejecting her Indian culture and family to be like everyone else. When a mythological demonic spirit latches onto her former best friend, she must come to terms with her heritage in order to defeat it.

The final reel of It Lives Inside delivers some solid scares and great creature work while still managing to ratchet up the tension and maintaining character and story integrity... I go to the movies to live someone else’s life for a couple of hours, I enjoy the feeling of being dropped into a world that is unfamiliar to me and having the film make me feel at home, even in a horror film. It Lives Inside does just that, it brings the audience into a world that they may not realize exists right next door, and then scares the crap out of them. Good stuff.

IT LIVES INSIDE initially emerged as an image: a kid on a bike, riding through Rockwellian suburbs. It’s right out of an early Amblin film. But what if this kid was escaping a puja, her school outfit wrapped in an ornate dupatta? For me, that image spoke to the duality I felt growing up as a first-generation immigrant in America. “Where do I belong? Which country is my home? Which world is ultimately mine?”

 

After I moved to North America from India at the age of four, a lot of my social education came from watching American horror films. I always wondered, what were families like mine doing while Bruce the shark tore through Amity’s waters, while Freddy Krueger slashed teenagers in the dreamscape, and while Jack Torrance chased his son through the maze-like halls of the Overlook? As it developed, IT LIVES INSIDE formed its own dual identity much like mine. On one hand, it is a love letter to the community and culture that raised me while on the other, it is a visceral experience that is designed to instill the same raw terror in its viewers that my favorite horror films instilled in me.

 

I was lucky enough to collaborate with the producers at QC Entertainment from an early stage of the film. Ray and Sean’s expertise in elevating socially-charged dramas to thoughtful, incisive mass entertainment in films like GET OUT and BLACKKKLANSMAN made them perfect creative partners from development to post-production. As the story developed, the ideas and emotions at its core only crystallized further and were never diluted or dulled down. My lucky streak extended when I got the opportunity to work with some of my dearest collaborators in bringing this movie to life, from my long- time director of photography, Matthew Lynn, and composer, Wesley Hughes, to Jameson Parker, our executive producer, Jack Price, our editor, and Nolan McNaughton, our sound designer.

 

IT LIVES INSIDE is not autobiographical but draws on real people that I have known and loved. In casting characters so close to my heart, I was awarded miracle after miracle, beginning with Megan Suri. She brings Samidha to life in a way that entirely transforms the words on the page. Betty Gabriel, Neeru Bajwa, Mohana Krishna, Vik Sahay and Gage Marsh all bring so much delicate humanity to the loved ones that fill out Samidha’s world. When I see them all on screen, they don’t feel like characters that I wrote anymore, but rather richly layered human beings that I recognize and cherish in my own life.I believe in horror cinema. It’s the greatest genre our art form has to offer, affording artists opportunities to tell challenging, emotionally rich stories within a harrowing, affective experience. In offering IT LIVES INSIDE to the cannon, I hope to give you a window into the lives of people I care deeply about... and to make you wonder if someone – or something – really is hiding in the dark, waiting to pop out of your dark, empty closet when the lights are out.