He’s Out There (2018): Never Eat the Forest Cupcakes

Children will eat almost anything. That does not mean they should accept baked goods from an unattended tea party in the woods.

He’s Out There is a 2018 home-invasion slasher about a mother, her two young daughters, a remote lake house, and a masked man who has apparently combined murder with an aggressive interest in arts and crafts. There is red string, a sinister picture book, human taxidermy, and enough references to “Daddy” to make the word stop sounding real.

It is also a useful reminder that a family vacation home is just a regular home with worse cell service and more places for a psychopath to stand dramatically between the trees.

Welcome Back to the Murder House

Laura drives her daughters, Kayla and Maddie, to the family’s isolated lake house for their annual getaway. Her husband, Shawn, has been delayed by work but plans to join them later that night. Their goodbye feels tense enough that we initially wonder whether a separation is hiding somewhere beneath the luggage, but no—he really does just have a meeting.

At the property gate, the padlock refuses to open until a local man named Owen arrives and demonstrates the advanced locksmithing technique of banging it against something. He explains that his is the only family still living nearby year-round. The people who once owned Laura’s house had a son named John who disappeared, and the family moved away afterward.

The movie would like us to suspect Owen. It would also like us to wonder whether Shawn is involved. To its credit, both possibilities work for a while.

What does not work quite as well is the idea that Laura’s family visits this house every year but apparently knows neither the only neighbor nor the tragic history of the house they own. The girls are familiar enough with the place to remember which room is creepy, yet the local missing-child story is brand-new information. Either these people have never spoken to anyone within a five-mile radius, or their annual vacations are conducted under witness-protection rules.

The girls immediately run to the dock after being told to stay away from the water, because children recognize safety instructions primarily as opening bids in a negotiation. Then they discover red string tied between the trees.

Naturally occurring forest string is rare, so of course they follow it.

The Worst Tea Party Favor

The string leads Kayla and Maddie to a tiny tea party in the woods. Two cupcakes are waiting for them beside a teapot. There is no adult, no explanation, and no conceivable reason to believe the food is safe.

Maddie eats one.

Kayla saves the other for Daddy, proving that sibling affection and attempted poisoning can occasionally look identical.

That evening, Laura reads the girls a book called Darkness Hides, an ominous story about a mouse, a crow, and the thing concealed by daylight. Someone has added crude drawings to its pages, including one of the girls on the swings outside. Laura assumes one of the children drew it. Kayla insists it was already there.

Maddie soon becomes feverish and struggles to breathe. Then she vomits up a yellow ribbon bearing the word “hello.” When Kayla admits where the cupcake came from, Laura tears open the uneaten one and finds green sludge wrapped around another ribbon: “goodbye.”

We have questions. What was in the cupcake? Was the breathing problem an allergic reaction, poison, ribbon intolerance, or the natural consequence of apparently swallowing a cupcake whole like a snake? The movie never explains. It simply establishes that accepting mysterious forest pastries is poor judgment and moves on.

The phone line is dead. Laura’s cell phone, which she left in the car, is missing. In its place is Maddie’s marker-covered zombie doll, neatly wrapped like a present. Laura gets both girls into the SUV and tries to leave, only for the wheels on the driver’s side to fall off as she backs away.

This is one of the movie’s better ideas. Horror cars usually refuse to start at the exact moment they are needed. Here, the engine works perfectly; John has removed the lug nuts. It is practical, mean, and just different enough to make an old escape-vehicle failure feel fresh.

Daddy Is Out There. Unfortunately.

Back inside, Laura finds a family photograph taped to the window. Shawn’s face and the girls’ faces have been scratched out, while hers remains untouched. The image seems like it should mean something specific, but the movie never returns to it. Perhaps John has a plan for Laura. Perhaps he ran out of crayon.

Then Maddie looks outside and announces that Daddy is standing under the tree.

It is not Daddy.

A man dressed in black and wearing a pale mask steps forward and gives Laura a slow wave. Maddie’s ability to spot him from another floor and halfway across the property briefly makes the movie feel supernatural. Nothing comes of that either, but for a moment Creepy Maddie has excellent ghost-child potential.

Meanwhile, Shawn reaches the locked front gate. He finds Laura’s phone ringing in the woods and follows another red string to a full-size family tea party made from crude mannequins. John watches from behind a tree, leaning his head against the trunk with the tender expression of someone admiring an engagement photo. Then he kills Shawn with an axe.

At the house, a recording of Shawn’s voice begins playing outside. Laura recognizes that it is repeating instead of responding, but when she investigates, Shawn’s body drops from the roof. His eyes are gone. The girls see him through the window and begin screaming for Daddy, forcing Laura to convince them that the corpse outside is somehow not their father.

Then the power goes out, because the house has apparently subscribed to the complete home-invasion package.

Laura tries taking the girls out the back. They find mannequin versions of themselves arranged at the swings: the girl figures seated and the mother hanging between them. Then John pelts the family with eggs.

Eggs are rude. Eggs are messy. Eggs are not, however, a compelling reason to abandon an outdoor escape route and run back into the building where the axe murderer has been arranging bodies. Still, everyone returns inside. The mother mannequin promptly comes through the glass after them.

A Picture Book With Live Updates

Kayla brings Laura Darkness Hides and shows her that its pages now illustrate everything John has done—the tea party, the string, the disabled car, and the family at the swings. The storybook is easily the movie’s most effective device. It makes John feel as though he is not merely stalking the family but writing them into a story whose ending he already knows.

We genuinely liked the book. The mouse-and-crow riddle, the drawings, and the way John turns it into a running record of the night are more memorable than most of the characters. We also wish it were a real book, although perhaps not one that updates itself whenever somebody is murdered nearby.

Laura realizes the eggs came from Shawn’s car, which means the car—and its keys—are still available. She hides the girls in a closet, promises to return in twenty seconds, and runs outside to retrieve the keys from her husband’s body. Twenty seconds feels ambitious for crossing the yard, searching a corpse, and returning to the second floor, but mothers are expected to meet demanding deadlines.

Owen chooses this moment for a late-night visit. Laura sees John approaching behind him and finally breaks a window to yell a warning. Owen turns too late and receives an axe to the head, officially clearing him as a suspect.

Laura tries another escape, but John reaches through the broken glass and pulls her out of the house. Kayla and Maddie are left alone. Kayla gives the enormous kitchen knife to her much younger sister, an unconventional leadership choice that at least gets Maddie moving.

Music from Shawn’s car lures them outside. They find Laura tied inside the trunk with red string webbed around her head. Before they can free her, John drives the axe into Laura’s side and chases the girls back to the house with the car.

They hide under a bed, which works right up until John enters the room and sits on it.

The Darkness Has a Monologue

John knows exactly where the girls are, but instead of pulling them out, he starts talking.

This is where he loses us.

He tells them that he grew up in the house, that Darkness Hides belonged to him, and that he has always been there watching their family during its annual visits. He explains the book’s riddle and finally announces, “The darkness is me,” before flipping the bed and drugging both girls.

Masked killers often benefit from silence. The less they explain, the more room they leave for the audience to imagine something frightening. John begins as a strange, ritualistic figure who builds effigies, plants poisoned cupcakes, and turns a children’s book into a murder plan. Then he crouches beside a bed and delivers his backstory like a disgruntled former tenant disputing a security deposit.

The speech also creates more questions than it answers. If he has watched this family return every year, why attack now? How did their copy of his book travel between the lake house and their regular home? What happened to his family? Where has he been living? Has he spent several summers watching quietly while waiting for his arts-and-crafts budget to come through?

The movie provides no answers. John talks just enough to spoil his mystery but not enough to give him a meaningful history. Freddy Krueger was scarier before he became chatty. John never earns the personality required to survive the same mistake.

Arts, Crafts, and Perishable Materials

Morning reveals the full extent of John’s project. The mannequins are not merely dressed as the family; he is replacing their stuffed pieces with actual body parts. Shawn’s severed arm has been attached to the father figure, and his eyes have been pushed into holes carved in its wooden face.

It is elaborate and deeply unpleasant. It is also going to smell terrible very soon. Murderers who work with organic materials need to consider long-term display conditions.

John begins carving eye sockets into Maddie’s mannequin. Kayla wakes and repeatedly moves in plain sight while he somehow fails to notice. He then lays out her arm and prepares to cut it off for the matching doll.

A music box begins playing near Shawn’s car. John follows it and discovers that Laura has escaped from the trunk. Despite an axe wound, serious blood loss, and what should be a firm medical instruction to lie down immediately, she attacks him.

Call it adrenaline. Call it maternal instinct. Call it the exclusive emergency reserve of blood supplied by mama-bear energy.

The fight is messy, and Laura eventually drives the axe into John’s back. This is a significant improvement over doing nothing. It is not the same as chopping off his head.

We cannot emphasize this enough: if a masked killer has terrorized your children, murdered your husband, axed your neighbor, removed multiple body parts, and turned a family holiday into a craft fair from hell, do not assume one blow to the back has completed the paperwork. Remove the head. Even if he is not supernatural, it eliminates a great deal of uncertainty.

Laura reunites with the girls and gets them into Shawn’s car. The engine briefly sputters—there is the traditional horror-car problem we avoided earlier—then starts. As they drive away, Kayla looks back and asks where John went.

His body is gone.

Dan attributes this to ants. We assume they were unusually organized ants with a strong interest in sequel setup.

Why This One Fades

He’s Out There has the pieces of a stronger movie. The picture book is creepy. The red-string trail and grotesque family tea parties give John a recognizable style. Removing the lug nuts is a clever variation on the disabled-car trope. The early suspicion around Shawn and Owen works, and Yvonne Strahovski gives Laura enough force to carry the survival portion of the story.

But the movie never gives us much reason to care about the people she is trying to save. The family arrives with almost no history or texture beyond “mother, father, and two daughters,” and most of what we learn about the girls is that Maddie is unsettling and Kayla freezes whenever everyone urgently needs to move. Their danger is easy to understand; their personalities are not.

John has the opposite problem. The movie gives him a collection of striking behaviors, then mistakes those behaviors for a character. Once he explains himself, the menace shrinks. What remains is a man with a mask, an axe, unresolved childhood issues, and no clear reason for choosing this particular night.

The result is not a disaster. It has actors, children, a house, some deaths, and credits. It is, in the most technically accurate assessment available, a movie that exists.

It is also the kind we expect to forget. If it appeared while we were flipping through channels, neither of us would feel compelled to stay. The best concepts—the book, the altered illustrations, the effigies—belong in a story with richer characters and a villain disciplined enough to stop talking.

The Verdict

He’s Out There turns a remote family getaway into a murder vacation, complete with poisoned pastries, missing lug nuts, and a DIY doll maker who really should have invested in less perishable supplies. There are effective images and a few smart choices, but they are trapped inside a thin story that keeps suggesting more than it is willing to explain.

Talon gives He’s Out There three cents. Dan gives it four and a half.

Worth watching if you enjoy isolated lake houses, sinister children’s books, aggressively themed killers, and spending ninety minutes asking why nobody has cut off the murderer’s head yet.