When the news broke that the creators of Saw and Paranormal Activity were working on a film together, horror fans took notice. Insidious sees director James Wan re-teaming with Saw writer-actor Leigh Whannell, and this time they’ve turned their terrifying focus from blood-letting to the uncanny unknown of the spiritual realm.
Evoking the family set-up of Poltergeist, Insidious follows proud parents Renai (28 Weeks Later’s Rose Byrne) and Josh (Watchmen’s Patrick Wilson) as they move their new family into an old house. Before you can say “redrum,” their son Dalton has an accident and lapses into a coma. His devoted mother tends to him at home, but late-night disruptions and sightings of shadowy apparitions become too much for the couple to handle and their relationship begins to fracture. The atmosphere becomes heavy with an ominous dread, spreading from the dark corners of a house that once promised hope and happiness.
Insidious transcends the real-estate spookiness of previous concepts like Amityville Horror, forging a genre-bending experiment that has more in common with Carnival of Lost Souls. By crafting a believable family and endangering the life of the youngest child, Wan and Whannell deliver shocks that are equal parts intimate and emotional. A return to their grassroots beginnings, Insidious’s scaled-down budget serves as a springboard for more innovative ideas and creative freedom than what’s possible on bigger, studio-driven productions.
Joining the household of restless spirits and malevolent entities are Barbara Hershey (known for her battle against supernatural forces in The Entity) as Josh’s mother Lorraine, and character actor Lin Shayne as a paranormal medium whose assistants provide comic relief with their outdated phantom-detection gear.
Wan and Whannell have spurned their hasty induction into the Splat Pack by summoning phantasmagoric scares and thrills, injecting an overdue shot of originality into a genre suffering from debilitating remake syndrome.