(Long Island, N.Y.) Considering that Insidious was made by the writing/directing team that gave birth to Saw, which has become the inbred, trailer trash grease stain of the horror movie world (although the original film had some potential), I was pretty much floored by how good Insidious actually is. Sure, it’s a whole lot Poltergeist, but it’s been a while since a movie’s made me check all the little dark corners in my pad before I go to sleep at night- it was effectively scary and pretty much kept me tense all throughout. It’s a very solid horror flick, especially considering that it’s only rated PG-13.
Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) move into a new house with their three kids. Of course, the house is haunted, so they move to another house. Surprise! This one’s haunted too! Only, it’s not. You see, after their oldest kid Dalton (Ty Simpkins) falls into a bizarre coma-like state for no reason, Josh’s
mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) calls in her friend Elise (Lin Shaye), who’s a professional when it comes to spooky stuff. It’s then that we discover that the houses aren’t haunted…it’s Dalton! It turns out that the kid’s soul likes to go wandering into spirit world whenever he’s asleep and the dead are just lining up nightly to hijack his body. The reason he’s in the coma is because one night his soul wandered a wee bit too far and got itself lost.
So, here’s where the Poltergeist parallel comes in…since daddy also possesses similar abilities as his son, it’s up to Josh to traipse into the mysterious void where his son has gone missing and rescue him. However, his son isn’t alone in the spirit world, and the dead are closing in on his vacant body…
Man, Insidious just plain had to be spooked! As a lifelong fan of horror movies, I had been finding the recent crop to be fairly tame. In other words, nothing scared me. Insidious did. It had atmosphere, frightening imagery, gobs of tension…hell, even the cheap jump scares were well done. Director James Wan really managed to convey the fear of the unknown very effectively, proving that there are just some things in this universe that man just isn’t supposed to know about.
Oh, and that gas mask scene was especially freaky. Why was Elise wearing a gas mask? Who knows? Who cares? It was awesome. Insidious is a low-budget affair, but it’s an example of money well-spent. The filmmakers didn’t get overly ambitious…they realized they couldn’t afford giant CG dragons and castles like in the much higher-budgeted (but stupid) Sucker Punch, so they went with what they had, and they made it work. I’ve heard some people complain that they thought the spirit world looked like a cheap high school play set, but I really don’t see the problem. Personally, I found it effective and creepy.
The one main complaint to make about Insidious, however, is that they showed too much. Yeah, we all hate it when horror movies hide the monster in the shadows and you never get to see it, but too much of the opposite can be a bad thing as well; sometimes a suggestion and fleeting glimpses can cause your mind to conjure up far worse images than any movie director can conceive, especially if your character designer isn’t up to par. Case in point: the idea of a red-faced demon bad guy in Insidious was kinda scary before you actually got to see it clearly, and it wound up being a cross between Darth Maul, Freddy Krueger, and the X-Men’s Nightcrawler. In reality, this is actually much lamer than it sounds. It wasn’t enough to ruin the movie at all, but it did diffuse some of the creep factor once we got a load of that demon’s silly mug.
Oh, and to the nice people who were sitting in the last row of the theater who felt it was perfectly fine to talk and laugh throughout the entire movie: I hope your cars all explode. With you in them. A bad case of the runs wouldn’t hurt, either. So, Insidious winds up being a big surprise to me…I didn’t see this one coming at all. If you’re into horror flicks (and you should be, they’re awesome), you owe it to yourself to check this one out.
