The Call is Coming From Inside the House

Okay, so, uh, what this trope kind of means, I guess, um, in a modern context is in the past, you know, obviously it was, it was stranger danger.

It was someone who's external to your environment.

But I think these days, you know, the, the trope has expanded to mean people who are within your circle that you, you ... that you trust on face value.

They could be, you know, friends, family, people you least expect, or in fact, you know, in, in my case, I guess, you know, sometimes it's interrogating whether or not the, the call coming from inside the house is actually from you.

So sometimes, you know, for example, if someone has a mental illness or they've got 32 split personalities, it might not just be the person who's the unreliable narrator.

It might be something, an aspect of themselves that they're dealing with.

When you think about that trope, like, often you just feel this absolute cold shiver of fear.

You feel like you've been dumped in cold water.

So obviously we've been sort of raised to kind of circle the wagons, home is a safe space or, you know, being at somebody's house that you trust, that's a safe space.

It's in violate.

But then you get, you know, films like Panic Room or all sorts of things like that where you've got someone who's actually managed to breach those very safe boundaries and turn the notion of what is home and what is safety and what is comfort and what is warmth on its head.

You know, it really would give an extra thrill of horror, I think, to a, a woman or a girl.

You, you might be, like, the strongest bodybuilding woman in the world, but I still think, you know, the way we've been conditioned to think about men are always stronger, women are the weaker sex, you know, all that kind of stuff that we, we...

You know, in, in this day and age, like, I think we've managed to bat back some of that stuff now, but it's still so inherent in, you know, there's men's jobs, there's women's jobs.

But I think because society is still so gendered, and particularly in, you know, certain cultural backgrounds, extremely gendered, I think that trope is still more horrifying for a, a female reader or a female listener or a female viewer.

To be honest, like, I mean, from, from my cultural background, I mean, living in this country even after this many decades, I would say that I don't necessarily feel safe anywhere in the sense that, like, you know, I've always sort of been a migrant person.

I've had to learn, you know, like, the institutions and the way things work and learn the language and learn how to speak like an Australian, learn to live here and, and learn to sort of, I guess, sound like everyone else, not necessarily look like everyone else.

I never feel safe.

But I think with that particular trope- Um, a lot of people, I guess, who live in the West would recognize it as, you know, an us and them kind of thing, right? But for us, like for ...

I guess migrant Australians are always so desperate to try and fit in, it's always an us and them kind of thing.

You know, for me, I never feel like an inherent sense of safety, particularly not now.

So I, I, I don't know, like I ... everything feels dangerous to me.

So like, like, you know, having that sort of chilling voice coming from inside your house, it's like, you know, like join, join the queue.

There's like so many dangerous things out there.

Like, you know, that, that's just one more horrific thing to deal with, right? I think those kinds of stories, I mean, this is showing my age, but that kind of trope was really huge, I guess, in the Virginia V.C.