Everybody has their ‘inner expert’ telling them whether a horror movie is any good or not, and I believe in each individual case, it’s 100% reliable. Did it scare you, did it engage you, did you like the characters, fear for them, empathize with them? Fear is a strong emotion, and to invoke that through a movie is a pretty big deal, it can have a physical impact on the human body, but that said, only if it works for you would you feel anything like this. Firstly, I get absolutely nothing from jumpy films (Gotcha’s as Roger Ebert calls them), 10 seconds after the stupid “jump” all is forgotten, that’s not a horror film, yeah it provokes a physical response, but that reaction is temporary, and I think it’s too easy to make a film designed to make people jump, but not actually put the fear into them. The jump formula is simple, and even the editing sequence and timing can be easily copied from a reliable example, with the audio in the right place, you’ve got a guaranteed audience reaction. Some people like that, and fair enough, for them it’s a reaction they like. There’s no denying that there isn’t a tension building moment, there’s a wait for it…………..aghhhhh! then the “Oh it was her stupid jock boyfriend who just climbed in through the back toilet window” or maybe you would even see something scary. But are you going to go to bed that night, still thinking about the jump, when handsome jock #2 put his hand on Generic blonde #3’s shoulder. Probably not.
Insidious is a haunted house movie, but it is soon revealed that it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s the comatose son of the family that live there who’s channeling evil spirits from a realm they call ‘The Further’ (which was also the original name for the film). He possesses an ability called Astral Projection, the ability to travel outside the physical body, an outer body experience if you like. But after an encounter with a demon in his parents attic, the young boy disappears too far into ‘the further’ and becomes lost, all this time, back in his house he remains in a medically unexplainable coma.
For me, the entities which populate this realm, the demons and freddies, they are what really make this movie scary. Some of the images are disturbing. The doll people, kind of reminded a bit of Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’ video, they looked eerie, evil and like they all had a permanent smile burned into their plastic mouths. The red faced demon that enjoys listening to the Tiny Tim music whilst he sharpens his demon claws, he’s a very scary son of a demon. All these entities want to do is hurt the people they haunt. The make-up effects, and general design of the evil fuckers is really cool, they are all so vivid in appearance. Insidious doesn’t really keep to the rule with the way the paranormal tends to behave, like paranormal activity does. We see (all too clearly) Demons, Goth looking long haired evil things, the aforementioned Doll people, the evil old lady, but these things have no problem just appearing in a bedroom and attacking the family. Ghosts don’t do that, but insidious’ ghosts can be as physically present as a human intruder would be.
The story doesn’t stop at the simple haunted house (or haunted boy) concept. There are some interesting plot developments further into the movie which reveal new possibilities in terms of how this all started, how to resolve the situation, that kind of thing. To go into it in too much depth may ruin the film for those that haven’t seen it, so I’m going to lay off with the plot details.
One of the greatest things to commend this film over is its excellent use of humor. Man this film can be scary, but it doesn’t lack any comic relief. Pretty much in the form of 2 very geeky paranormal investigators called specs and tucker, the audience can have a lot of fun with these bumbling weirdos that seem pretty freaked out by what they have found themselves investigating. But our main characters, with the suffering and desperation eating in to their lives, keep a stone cold straight face.
After a while I started to become irritated by something I’ve been irritated by before, more recently by certain films involving demons and the paranormal. The dick head, none believer husband/boyfriend. Even in the Haunted house reality shows on cable, there’s usually some hard nosed husband that doesn’t believe a word his wife tells him. Patrick Wilson plays the father/husband, I’ve only really seen him as night owl in the film adaptation of Watchmen, he played his part well, but once he started to disbelieve everything the paranormal pros were telling him, my eyes started to role a little thinking to myself the next scene we may see him sitting in a bar having a beer and a chat about paranormal bull shit with Micah Sloat, Ryan Reynolds & Brian Boland. He soon comes around after he see’s some of the pictures his comatose son has drawn, and how they resemble all the crazy shit the paranormal experts have told him. The non-believer husband type of conflict seemed unnecessary to me because there was plenty coming from the entities of “the further”, albeit it is brief.
Taking a popular, arguably over used horror concept and making something original out of it must be difficult, but screen writer Leigh Whannell (2 iterations of the Saw franchise) and Director James Wan (Saw) seemed to have accomplished this with a neat story idea populated by simple characters, sinister visuals, cool special effects and make up, realizing what was to become a disturbing depiction of things many would consider to be cliché, but they are also very human fears they play with. Have you ever watched a really scary flick whilst lying in bed late at night, and dangled your leg out of bed, when your foot feels that empty abyss of ‘under the bed’ and you carefully, almost ignorantly pull your foot back into bed for fear of the unknown has beaten you, regardless of whether you admit to yourself it has. Insidious taps into those human feelings and vulnerabilities.
You will no doubt find a number of examples where the characters do stupid things in order for the film makers to shoe horn in one of their awesome scary ideas, but the pay off is usually worth it. I’m going to go as far as saying I think this movie is almost as good as Drag me to Hell. It’s strengths & weaknesses may lie in different areas, and it is a little more straight faced, but it has that wacky combo of realism & authenticity locked in with an almost tongue in cheek approach to something so dark and serious.
If you can forgive some of the strange editing, the flawed characters, the heavy reliance on music and sound design to create tension (may or may not be a good thing), you may just enjoy this one. I think this movie will be hated and liked equally, but the big question is, does it scare you?
