World premiering earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, the genre-bending horror slasher “It’s What’s Inside,” which was picked up by Netflix for acquisition rights soon after the festival, is coming out this October.
While it premiered in Sundance’s Midnight section—generally reserved for horror movies, the filmmakers—and was sometimes described as a slasher, director Greg Jardin, executive producer Colman Domingo, and Academy Award nominee Greg Jardin never regarded it as either.
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“We never considered it horror,” Jardin told Netflix’s Tudum in a recent conversation. “I’d say it’s a sci-fi thriller with jokes.”
Jardin’s original concept was simple. “Let’s do a movie in a creepy house. Eight friends get together. One dude brings a suitcase. What’s in the suitcase? I just ideated on that for a while,” he told Sundance last winter.
More of a genre-mashup featuring blindsiding twists, breakneck turns, and a big ensemble, Jardin says this edge-of-your-seat-genre-blender is more about “the horror of the soul.”
Jardin makes his directorial debut with this feature, which he also wrote, and the plot is anything but simple.
“It’s about a bunch of friends [who] get together in a house. One of them brings up a body-swapping machine,” Jardin explained. “He suggests they play a game with it where they can all simultaneously swap bodies. Then the night devolves into existential chaos.”
Alrighty then. On top of Domingo, the cast features Brittany O’Grady, James Morosini, Gavin Leatherwood, Nina Bloomgarden, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Reina Hardesty, Devon Terrell, and David Thompson.
Netflix will premiere the film during the spooky season on October 4, 2024. Watch the trailer below.
Here’s the official synopsis:
A group of friends gather for a pre-wedding party that descends into an existential nightmare when an estranged friend arrives with a mysterious game that awakens long-hidden secrets, desires, and grudges.