Again, not shitting on the actual movies here. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a classic, and The Hills Have Eyes is highly underrated. It's just weird that for about 30 years now, there's been such a strong market for cousin-porking cannibals with severe social issues, right?
Related: 5 Simple Ways To Make Horror Movies Stop Sucking
No one likes the idea of a stranger in their home, because that's where you're most comfortable pooping. The whole "The call is coming from inside the house!" thing, which dates all the way back to 1979's When A Stranger Calls, kind of makes sense. We still have home invasions, right? But it truly gets weird when this genre focuses in on elaborate ghost squatters.
As far as I know, when you have a stranger actively living in your house, they do tend to try to stay hidden. This is a real thing that happens sometimes, and boy howdy is that crazy as hell. But any good horror story has to take reality and make it weirder, so instead of just a hobo in your attic who creeps out at night to eat your canned beans, you get movies like Housebound or Netflix's infuriatingly awful Open House, which spend their full run time convincing you there's actually a ghost in the house, then it turns out it's just some rando. This is a pretty solid bait and switch that you'll see frequently.
The Boy spends its run time assuring us that Brahms, an entirely preposterous doll that a woman is hired to babysit as if it were a real boy, is in fact a real boy. Or rather, possessed by the ghost of a real boy. The real Brahms died years ago, his parents kept this doll and treat it like it's 100% alive, and spooky shit ensues. It's implied that the doll is not only evil, but weirdly in love with and/or going to murder his babysitter. Well, that's fine. Except up yours audience, it's not true. At the end we find out Brahms never died; he's just eating fish heads in the attic.