The Dreyer family has just moved into a big beautiful house in an upscale neighborhood. Little do they know that their attic is infested... with Gary Busey.
Mimi Rogers, Michael McKean, and a couple of kids move into this great big house. But before they do, Gary Busey - just released from the mental hospital after having burned his abusive parents to death eight years prior - sneaks in a and builds himself a little habitat in their attic. He hides it with a false wall and he taps into the house's intercom system, and when the family is away or asleep he sneaks downstairs, raids their fridge, messes with their stuff, steals their photos, and so on. All the while, he's falling in love with Mimi Rogers and scheming to ingratiate himself into the family.
Busey is marvelously creepy in this, of course. The other actors go through a lot of Lifetime Channel-esque melodrama as they deal with their domestic problems and such. The kids particularly get put through the ringer, with both of them exhibiting the full range of emotions from fear, to anger, to sadness, to their own individual brands of crazy. And speaking of crazy, there's the element of the peeping Tom neighbor next door, who rivals Busey in the creep factor. But in the end, the movie belongs to Busey. No other actor could be so perfect for this role.
Hider In The House may not be a true "horror" movie (more of a thriller, I suppose), but it's about as scary a real-life concept as I've ever seen in a movie. Did you ever look at a stack of dishes on the counter and think, "I don't remember putting those there?" Or have you ever thought you heard footsteps with no apparent source? For some people, these little odd moments are disconcerting, and might make them think of the supernatural. But wouldn't it be far more frightening to find that you had a "hider" in the house?
And wouldn't it be mind-meltingly horrifying to find that the hider was Gary Busey?
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