‘It Lives Inside’ Director-Writer Bishal Dutta Talks Recent Indie Horror Box Office Success: “Good Horror Cinema Transcends Barriers”

Now is a great time to release a horror movie, proven by the recent box office success of Insidious: The Red Door, M3GAN, and Scream VI – but even more so, it’s a great time to release an independent horror movie. This summer, A24’s Talk To Me made over 14 times its budget at the box office, becoming the studio’s highest-grossing horror movie. Bishal Dutta, writer and director of the new horror flick It Lives Inside, recognizes this trend, saying, “Good horror cinema transcends all kinds of barriers.” 

In a Zoom interview with Decider, Dutta shared, “It’s a miracle to have a wide theatrical release. I love the theatrical experience of watching horror movies.”

The filmmaker named The Conjuring, which he saw upon its 2013 release when he was 16 years old, as a formative theater-going experience. “Everybody was daring each other to go see it because was so scary and that has always stayed with me,” he said.

Now, during a time when theatrical movies are still struggling in the post-pandemic era, the horror genre has been credited with bringing audiences back to theaters. In 2022, Yahoo Finance reported that horror – at the time, Smile and Halloween Ends – was imperative in helping theaters recover after COVID-19 sparked shutdowns.

Dutta — who calls horror “the greatest genre that film has ever created” — believes this is because “there’s something universal about fear… I think that good horror cinema transcends all kinds of barriers, and it hits you deep in your core. That’s why it’s always going to survive. It serves a very important social function that we can purge so many of our fears and feel a certain catharsis with an audience of others and still be safe.”

It Lives Inside, Dutta’s feature film debut, released in theaters today, September 22, 2023. The movie, produced by Get Out’s Raymond Mansfield and Sean McKittrick, follows a young high schooler named Sam (Megan Suri) who rejects her Indian culture and community in an effort to fit in at school. After a mythological demon causes the disappearance of her former best friend, she must connect with her heritage to protect her loved ones.

The movie is deeply personal and beautifully rooted in Hindu mythology, though it doesn’t forget that it’s a horror movie. In fact, it’s Dutta’s connection to the story combined with his adoration of the genre that brings these terrifying sequences to life: “I had grown up hearing so many ghost stories – demons stories that were passed down through generations of my family.”

When Dutta set out to make his first movie, he knew he wanted to draw from these stories. “I wanted to bring those stories with me because they’ve lasted so long, so there has to be something universal about them. I wanted to bring that to the big screen.”

Beyond the paranormal aspect, Dutta also sees himself in Sam’s character. “Growing up, and hearing experiences from family and friends, there was a feeling of bifurcation, as being, on one side, Indian, and the other side, American. As I grew up, I was able to synthesize those two into a single identity. That felt like such an interesting conflict for a horror film specifically.”

Connecting with the cultural aspects, Dutta masterfully uses traditional Indian cuisine as a storytelling device — one that is carried through to the final moments of the movie. When coming up with the idea, he thought of the role food plays in his culture and didn’t shy away from it despite knowing it might not resonate with a Western audience. 

“I was thinking about the significance of food and making food with your family, and how these dishes have a sort of mythic quality to them. When we were shooting, it was so important that it never felt like just a close-up of food. Those were some of the most important shots in the movie to me,” the director said. “When we were shooting the scenes, we were looking for the right lens to create a three-dimensional feeling, like you can just reach in and grab something, as well as how to color it, so that you’re seeing the rich hues… We took so much care to convey its importance within these characters, within the family, and within the culture.”

Dutta looked to The Bear and Jon Favreau’s 2014 movie Chef for inspiration. He also went out to eat “a lot of Indian food” with his crew. This, he said, was crucial to the filmmaking process as they would study the amount of steam that arose from each dish, the “sizzle” of the food, and how they all felt as they were tasting and smelling the meal. “We were always talking about how to translate this feeling on the screen,” he added.

When it came to the horror sequences, Dutta’s love of the genre helped bring his story to life, specifically Final Destination, which may have “maybe made its way” into the movie’s biggest kill scene. The scene, which takes place on a swing set, finds Sam talking to her love interest, Russ (Gage Marsh), about her experience abandoning her close friend — who has since gone missing — and her insecurities surrounding her cultural background. Dutta wanted the conversation to take place on the swings “to really make her feel like a kid again.” Once that was established, he was ready to “build a real horror sequence.” 

Crafting the paranormal attack, Dutta thought, “Can we do a bear attack without having a bear essentially?” The filmmaker continued, “The swing became a motivator for a lot of the action in that scene. Gage Marsh did his own stunts. It was amazing. I was like, ‘Are you still alive after some of those takes?'”

Much like what’s at the core of Final Destination horror, Dutta considered during filming, “How can we take something as innocuous and childlike as a swing and turn it into something that people are hopefully going to leave this movie and be scared forever?” Well, ask that to my lifelong fear of car washes and driving behind log trucks.

The heart of It Lives Inside is the thoughtful — and ambitious – melding of Dutta’s cultural influences and his love for the horror genre, which ultimately works because he uses them to complement one another. “Our specific approach to this movie and the representation in this movie was that I never want it to be intellectual or didactic about it. But rather, I wanted to immerse the audience inside the culture,” he said. 

And that he did, bringing forth an original story with Indian leads and terrifying sequences that leaves such an intense feeling of uncertainty that viewers will be craving more — meaning he very well might have just sparked a whole movie series of his own. For Talk To Me’s instant success, a sequel was announced less than two weeks later. One can only hope that It Lives Inside garners a similar response, and the boom of indie horror continues to rise.