With dead children showing up at restaurant bars, a dead mother always lurking in the shadows, and blood as black as tar oozing out of keyholes, The Uninvited is a horror film that keeps your nerves on edge. Before the film has begun, Mrs. Rydell (Maya Massar), the terminally-ill mother of the Rydell household, has died in a tragic fire, her daughter Anna (Emily Browning) has been hospitalized following a suicide attempt, and the blooming romance between Mr. Rydell, Steven (David Strathairn), and Mrs. Rydell's nurse, Rachael (Elizabeth Banks), has come into its own. When the film opens, we find Anna in the midst of sharing a recurring dream about the night of her mother's death with her psychologist. And when she returns home soon after, it is as if that dream, filled with an evil truth that Anna just cannot seem to find, begins to come to life around her.

The seemingly quintessential evil stepmother story, The Univited is driven by Anna's quickly evolving notion that Rachael was somehow involved in her mother's death, may not even be who she claims to be, and is essentially just waiting to get rid of Anna and her sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel) once and for all. With every ticking minute and each new ghostly appearance, you know that it is only a matter of time until a fatal confrontation leaves the already suffering family short at least one more member. But with a fairly unexpected twist coming into play near the story's end, the true horror of The Uninvited is that the actual incarnation of its evil pushes us to not just contemplate the evil outsider, but to come face to face with the battle between good and evil within.

Central to Anna's suspicions regarding Rachael is the increasing sense that neither the people nor the events that surround her are what they seem. While the fire that killed her mother was officially an accident, Anna believes it was murder. While Rachael came into the Rydell home as a nurse, Anna believes she is a cold-blooded killer. And while Anna's release from the mental hospital is supposed to be about a return home and a rebuilding of family, all signs point instead to a family and home on a crash course for an even worse fate than they have already endured.

As the movie's title indicates, in Anna's life is an evil presence that is not welcome. In concrete terms, it is a murderer. In less concrete terms, however, it could be characterized as everything from the unforgiven actions of another, the undealt-with sufferings of the past, and the unadmitted error of one's own logic. "We all have things in our past that we're ashamed of. I think it's best if we just let them go," says Rachael. "We survive by remembering, but sometimes we survive by forgetting," Anna's doctor tells her. But as the movie unfolds, what we see is that simply forgetting that evil is there does not make it go away.

Central to the story of The Uninvited is the concept that good and evil cannot coexist in harmony. Almost as soon as the story begins, we know that at some point either Anna or Rachael is going to have to die. And when it comes to evil within ourselves, the scary reality is that the same is true. We may attribute our less-than-loving thoughts and less-than-noble acts to an alternate persona, but still, that person will remain a part of us. We may construct fictional realities in which self-centered behavior and unforgiving judgment are passed off as self defense or righteous justice, but in the end, the only narrative that will remain is the truth. And in the same way that the evil within the Rydell household destroys their home and essentially every member of their family, so will any evil we allow to keep residence in ourselves destroy us.

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