There’s Someone Inside Your House Study Guide

An author of Young Adult literature, Stephanie Perkins was born in South Carolina. She grew up in Arizona and later attended college in California and Georgia. She currently resides in the mountains of North Carolina with her husband and a cat, Mr. Tumnus. In addition to being an author and editor, Perkins has also worked as a bookseller and librarian. Perkins’s first book, Anna and the French Kiss, was published in 2010. Perkins followed her debut novel with Lola and the Boy Next Door (2011), Isla and the Happily Ever After (2014), There’s Someone Inside Your House (2017), and The Woods Are Always Watching (2021). Speaking about what inspired her to write There’s Someone Inside Your House, Perkins recalls becoming a horror fan when she saw the film Scream in 1996.

There’s Someone Inside Your House is based on slasher films of the 20th century—Stephanie Perkins cites 1996’s Scream as a significant influence. The slasher film is a subgenre of horror films that follows a killer as they stalk and murder a group of characters, often youths. As examples, film critics cite the Italian giallo films of the 1960s and 1970s, including Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). These films often featured highly stylized cinematography and themes of sexuality and paranoia. Many critics consider the 1970s and 1980s to be the golden age of the slasher film, beginning with the commercial success of Halloween (1978), which follows heroine Laurie Strode as she repeatedly dodges the attacks of a masked murderer who recently escaped from a psychiatric institution. Halloween exhibits many conventions considered hallmarks of the genre, such as the “final girl” trope, which refers to the (usually) female protagonist who is the sole survivor of the group of characters stalked by the killer. Conventionally, the film spares the final girl the same gruesome fate as the other characters due to her perceived moral superiority—the final girl, for instance, does not participate in promiscuous sex or recreational drugs. Horror films often reflect contemporary social fears. As such, some view the popular slasher films that arose during the genre’s golden era as a conservative backlash against the culture of sexual liberation that took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. The genre saw a revival in the mid-1990s with the release of Scream in 1996. Many slashers released during this era, including Scream, are self-referential, actively mocking earlier films’ formulaic, dated conventions. More recent slasher films further challenge earlier films’ arguably sexist, dated tropes. For instance, Makani Young, the teenage protagonist of There’s Someone Inside Your House (and its 2021 film adaptation), manages to survive the killer’s murderous rampage even though she drinks, has sex, and participates in other supposed vices. Ti West’s X (2022) features a final girl, Maxine Minx, who is a sexually liberated adult film actress as its final girl.

Stephanie Perkins has written several other novels for young adults, including Anna and the French Kiss (2010), Lola and the Boy Next Door (2011) and Isla and the Happily Ever After (2014). Like There’s Someone Inside Your House, Perkins’s most recent book, The Woods Are Always Watching (2021), is a thriller. It tells the story of two best friends who set out on a camping trip in a national forest the summer before college. Their plans take a turn for the worse when they go off-trail and find themselves desperately lost. There’s Someone Inside Your House is inspired by teen slasher films such as Scream (1996). A classic in the genre of young adult horror is Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973). The book centers around a group of friends who accidentally hit and kill a young boy while driving home from a party. Duncan, hailed as the “queen of teen thrillers,” has written many other books for young adults, including Summer of Fear (1976) and Killing Mr. Griffin (1978). More recent works of young adult horror include The River Has Teeth by Erica Waters, which follows a girl named Natasha who turns to the supernatural for answers when her sister goes missing, and All These Bodies by Kendare Blake, a murder mystery thriller set in the midwestern United States in the 1950s.