Movie Reviews for Writers: They Live Inside Us

This review contains serious spoilers near the end. You’ve been warned. 

This little new horror gem might not be everyone’s cup of tea (or red dyed corn syrup) but it’s a pretty spry little thriller about widowed screenwriter Jake who feels all the ideas for good horror have been done to death and he therefore takes his daughter Dani to a famous haunted house (The Booth House) to get inspired for ideas for his new screenplay. That sounds like such a typical, paint by numbers horror movie, but trust me, this one says a lot more than just slash, stab, slash. It’s also a feature film the director made based on a previous short (with the same title) he had created for his anthology The Witching Season.

The first lesson for writers in They Live Inside Us is that we all fear facing that empty page. When the ideas all seem done before and nothing is flowing, all that white space (either on screen on on actual paper) can be daunting. Jake fights that by having a notebook of movie monsters to stimulate ideas and what-ifs to at least get him writing. Some of us have notebooks of starting points and previous ideas and even sentence prompts, but having SOMETHING handy never hurts. 

The second lesson is that grief can affect your writing, and that’s okay. Let it do its work in  you. I’ve covered grief for writers in my review of Shadowlands, so I won’t repeat that here. (Just click the link to read that review.)

Next we cover what I feel is the main point of this awesome little film. As writers, we write what we want. Not we write what we want to, but we write what it is we actually want to either possess or to experience somewhere deep within us.

Read more:

https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2021/03/movie-reviews-for-writers-they-live.html