Insidious

Insidious (2011)

Director: James Wan

Cast: Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson, Barbara Hershey, Lin Shaye, Ty Simpkins

21st century American Horror films can be lumped together in several categories.

The first fall into the successful, money-making theatrical releases, such as the terrible Saw and Hostile franchises, Paranormal Activities, and remakes of classics like Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Included in here is also the "Dead" remakes, like Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, and Romero's Land of the Dead, definitely the best of this category.

The second category is reserved for the overseas remakes, like the creepy, slithery ghosts of Asian inspired enterprises (The Grudge, The Ring), and even-paced, highly creative endeavors like Let Me In (from Sweden's Let the Right One In). In this second category, I would also include foreign directors who create stellar English language films, such as Amenabar's A + ghost epic, The Others.

The third involves independent films for gore enthusiasts and horror aficionados like myself, which frequently hit our most vulnerable terror buttons and remain etched into a canon of best of the best: Cabin Fever, Wolf Creek, The Human Centipede, Jeepers Creepers, The Descent. Several of these films are so nasty and horrifying that I wouldn't even advise most people to watch them. I love them!

But the last category is also my favorite, and these are B+ movies with B actors, which take place (usually) in quaint, upper-class American homes, and seem on the surface generic in story, and make little money in the box-office and usually come out at the beginning of the year. One example is the terrifying Orphan. Another is Insidious.

Insidious is one of those original and frightening endeavors that plays with our sensibilities for the simple life of thirty-some professionals. Unlike the third category of horror films, movies like Insidious tend to dive straight into the terror, instead of setting up the slow "normal people doing normal things" pace for the first hour. There is value in both techniques, but there is something to be praised about these films that must maintain the fright tempo before inevitably presenting us with our boogey man.

Renai and Josh Lambert (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson, respectively) move into a new house with their three children. When it opens, Renai and her younger son, Dalton, are both having bad dreams and not sleeping well. Items in the house keep moving or being misplaced. Patrick Wilson works too hard and his wife is forced to unpack all by herself. Dalton goes upstairs to the attic, hears some terrifying noises, and falls and hits his head. He's fine. Everyone goes to bed. But the next morning he doesn't wake up, and he's stuck in an inexplicable coma for the rest of the film.

In B+ American movies, the central female character (i.e the mother and wife) is the protagonist, always a step ahead of the game than her husband. Renai hears voices in the baby's room through the monitor. She witnesses a large ghost man dressed in black in her room. After convincing her husband to move to another house (genius idea! Movie's over, let's all go home), she almost immediately meets another ghost, a creepy little 1920's boy running and dancing about. Finally, she has the idea to contact a specialist in these matters; a ghost whisperer and her two nerdy toadies.

Now comes the twist (Spoilers ahead!) which was obvious from the start. Dalton is an astro-planer, and drifted too far outside his body one night, never to return. And now cruel-spirited ghosts and spirits want to possess him, including a particularly vicious demon with a predilection for marionette puppets. It is up to Josh, a reformed astro-planer, to enter the ghost world and retrieve his son's lost soul before it's too late.

Insidious is consistently scary, consistently engaging, and genuinely disturbing for all the right reasons. James Wan is great at suggestions, so that when we see the interior of the ghost world, with a stationary young teenager holding a shotgun, pointing it at her murdered nuclear family, and grinning, we grimace from the concept, rather than the visuals.

No good horror film has a happy ending. The doomed ending is as intrinsic to the genre as everything else. Why is this so? Well, I believe that horror narratives serve as catalysts for our inherent sense of cosmic punishment. Characters can behave badly, or in goodness, but it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. What's out there waiting to destroy us has only one agenda, and once it's pointed us out among others, we are fucked. The best we can do is hope and pray that everything will work out in the end, even if we never had a chance.

B+