I’ve been saying for a while now that supernatural horror movies need to start mining other belief systems besides Christianity. Don’t get me wrong, I love my typical Judeo-Christian demon films, but the subgenre needs to expand its horizons a bit. It needs to tell new stories that Western audiences haven’t seen a million times before, and that’s why I love the trailer for It Lives Inside. The movie is about a girl named Sam who rejects her Indian heritage in order to fit in at school and be like everyone else, but when a demon from Indian mythology attaches itself to one of her friends, she has to learn to embrace her family’s culture in order to defeat it.
Admittedly, that’s a pretty vague plot synopsis, but thankfully, the It Lives Inside trailer fleshes it out a bit. The demon in this movie is called a Pishach, and according to one of the characters in the story, “It doesn’t kill you right away. It eats you slowly. When it’s ready, it eats your soul.”
That’s pretty intriguing, and from the looks of it, the things this Pishach does while waiting to eat its victim’s soul are absolutely terrifying. Even though this trailer is only about two and a half minutes long, it’s jam-packed with fantastic scares, so I can only imagine how awesome the full movie is going to be.
On top of that, it also looks like this film will feature likable characters and a genuinely emotional story, so it promises to be way more than a one-note scare-fest. It looks like It Lives Inside is just a great movie all around, and if it’s as good as the trailer suggests, it might even be one of the best horror films of 2023.
It Lives Inside doesn’t currently have a release date, but it should be coming out sometime later this year.