the call is coming from inside the house

English

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium. Particularly: “Some horror-movie cliché, but from what? - When A Stranger Calls (1979)”)

Phrase

the call is coming from inside the house

1. Something is endemic, and not the result of outside influence or interference.
   • 2020, David Bond, “A House Divided: Ben Lerner’s America”, in Anthropology Now‎^[1]:

     The groundwork of Trumpism was laid not by foreign tinkering or stratospheric inequality but in the barbed souls of young white men coming of age in the 1990s. The call is coming from inside the house.

   • 2020, Douglas Almond, Xinming Du, and Alana Vogel, “Russian Holidays Predict Troll Activity 2015-2017”, in National Bureau of Economic Research‎^[2]:

     As the New Yorker recently put it, the impactful IRA narrative may be an “overly convenient” explanation for our home-grown problems and: What if, to borrow an old horror-movie trope, the call is coming from inside the house?

   • 2021 December 14, Paul Elliott Johnson, I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States, University of Alabama Press, →ISBN, page 228:

     But this is no takeover: the call is coming from inside the house. What folks call “alt-Right” simply names a spirit lurking in American conservatism.

   • 2022, Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 223:

     In contrast to accounts that see the changes of the 1970s as something “done to” the state by outside actors, whether intellectual movements or political interest groups, in this story the call is coming from inside the house.