In the 1800s, a lot of folks started getting into black art principles. I don't mean the black arts, like the ancient arts of spell casting and demonology and alchemy and conjuration. I mean principles of design for stage magic and spiritualist charlatanism that teach us that what we can't see doesn't exist. That what we've wrapped in enough of the right kind of black velvet and lit with the right color of light at exactly the right level and the right angle can disappear before the eyes of an audience. Magicians and early filmmakers like Georges Méliès, avant-garde artists like Oskar Schlemmer all used it in their work to varying degrees of sophistication. But without it, without craning our necks backward in time to look at it, insidious would perhaps be less insidious.
When the movie came out, it was a bit of a sensation. It was a real genre juggernaut. I remember the poster, and being annoyed by the poster. “Insidious is.” I -S, Is in red in the middle of the title. I remember seeing the trailer. Boy, did they make liberal use of that “Insidious is.” Fashioning it into the marketing tagline to beat all marketing taglines, “Insidious is… insidious.” Which in fact, it kind of is, because it has a way of insidiously making you feel like maybe you've seen it before. And that might give you a false sense of security or complacency, until it expertly subverts or exceeds your expectations, terrifying you. But its claws are sharp and getting sharper, and they get under your skin. Because it is a little self-referential and it's a lot genre-referential.
These guys, Wan and Whannell, know what they like, and they are at the helm. There are aesthetic and storytelling points of intersection with other films of theirs and other films that they love. James Wan's name is on the blackboard in Josh's classroom on the detention list. There's a drawing of Billy the puppet from Saw on the blackboard below. There are puppets, there are mannequins, there are spiraling camera movements. Families are moving into a new house. This has the trademarks of James Wan and Leigh Whannell all over it. And in moments when we, as the camera, push into Dalton's room soon after he's had his tumble in the attic, we push in toward the window and we have to ask ourselves, are we scared of the trees outside because we've been conditioned by Poltergeist? Or are we scared of what hasn't entered the frame yet, a la Salem's Lot? Have we seen such a bold red in a new-to-you house since Margot Kidder and James Brolin shacked up together in Amityville?
And was it in Poltergeist II, long ago, when we saw the dead waiting in line to cross over into suburbia? Is this the better remake of Poltergeist than the remake of Poltergeist? And it had been almost 10 years since Jeepers Creepers took a creepy old standard and made it the soundtrack for terror. And as in in 2009's Drag Me to Hell, we get a title smash, not once but twice, again at the end, with loud, scary, orchestral strings. It feels, honestly, like a page out of the Exorcist playbook. A scratchy string sting and a smash to black, bang.
Like those magicians and phony spiritualists, schlock producers and budget auteurs from Ed Wood to William Castle knew that some black duvetyn, a fog machine, and a single light source could overcome both narrative and financial shortcomings. You can't tell what's lurking in the swirling atmospheric dark. It could be outer space's Plan 9. It could be the 13th Ghost or the Nightwalker. It could be, in fact, a Blair Witch. So Insidious traffics in tropes and cliché as it takes horror conventions and a straightforward, principally practical approach to effects, including the black art principles I mentioned earlier, It aims to refashion all of these things into something new. Family moves into a new house, there are ghosts, where do we go from here?
Connecting it to other films on Scare U's blood-curdling curriculum, as I like to do, I want to underline that here, with Joseph Bishara as the lipstick-faced demon and the composer of Insidious's insidious score, this is the second film in this half of the season to feature more than a cameo from its composer, as with House's Asei Kobayashi, the watermelon farmer and member of the band Godiego. Also, as with House of 1000 Corpses, which reminded us that “the boogeyman is real,” here I think Wan and Whannell want us to feel like the things that go bump in the night are real too that your bedroom closet under the right conditions is a gateway for the dead to enter this world.
Also, as with House of 1000 Corpses, when we go to the scariest place we're going to find ourselves, we step into a world that is kind of removed from reality and also differentiated by design from the rest of the film. In House of 1000 Corpses, it was Dr. Satan's Czechoslovakian underground ossuary laboratory. Here, it's the lipstick-faced demon’s Freddy Krueger by way of the Phantom of the Opera layer in the furthest reaches of The Further. It's part Broadway dressing room, part Leatherface’s tannery, part puppet theater. You can almost imagine that tooting circus organ piping away—if it weren't for Tiny Tim tip-toeing through tulips on repeat ad infinitum. Also, as with House of 1000 Corpses and Frankenstein's Army and Livid and things like My Bloody Valentine and Hellboy and The Crazies and Contagion and Little Shop of Horrors, there's just something spooky about a gas mask.
This film is structured in three acts over 90 minutes. They are neatly broken into almost equal thirds. And in each, we're successively destabilized through the filmmakers' use of their cinematic tools. As we progress through it, things look different. Lighting, color, and direction change, lenses are swapped, camera angles move lower and point higher. Eventually the boundaries of physical space that define for us where we are vanish. Eventually a barely perceptible whisper of vapor tells us that there may be a floor there. Characters navigate these voids seemingly by gliding or being conducted from place to place. I mean, again, this is kind of out of the William Castle playbook, like the jump scare housekeeper who shows up in the basement of the House on Haunted Hill. Josh doesn't so much walk into The Further, he floats.
I think there's something about the sound design, which I think is fabulous taken as a whole, that works in tandem with the visual and narrative devices at work to create a total experience for the audience. The monotony of the dripping of water or the rhythmic beeping of Dalton's heart monitor, the hypnotic intention of the metronome, sounds which, when their tempo is even subtly adjusted, have an undeniable impact on the viewer. Eventually, the sound of cracking wood is revealed to be a signifier of the demon's presence.
So you think back to when you may have heard this very quotidian domestic sound previously in the film, and you think about what it implies from a semiotic point of view. And when the sound bed is so lush and so considered, it makes the few moments of near silence that we experience that much more terrifying. I would also say that the acting is, for the genre, great. Patrick Wilson, fresh from the New York theater (where we don't take no shit), believably centers the film as a husband, father, and history teacher with no recollection of his own history. Rose Byrne, excellent. Barbara Hershey, a delight. The kids, not annoying. They're no Patty McCormick caliber little Rhoda Penmarks perhaps, but they’re fine. And Lin Shaye, Lin Shaye, God save Lin Shaye. Sister, of course, to Bob Shaye, the head of New Line who made A Nightmare on Elm Street happen. Lin Shaye, who appears as the English teacher in A Nightmare on Elm Street and in memorable supporting roles in There's Something About Mary, Kingpin, Dumb and Dumber, Snakes on a Plane, and about 215 other credits. But Lin Shaye shines in this movie. When she appears, it's like a new color we hadn't seen before. She makes Elise instantly believable and trustworthy, instantly lovable. instantly iconic.
While this film has one of the best and most indelible jump scares in horror cinema, it could be argued that this film is filled with jump scares, large and small. But I think the moments in Insidious that that term can be applied to, I think they're actually a collision of things like frame-edge horror and a series of brilliantly abbreviated little crescendos. If you watch this closely, it's like Wan has sometimes just removed a critical beat that has an uncanny chilling effect, or he'll instantly cross-cut to a more unsettling vision of something we've grown accustomed to, more or less, looking at, throwing us just off our axes—just a little bit, just a hair. So we're wide open to be assaulted by the scare that he almost invariably delivers in the next frame.
And further, regarding things like uncanniness and audience discomfort, the “bride in black” ghost, and I believe also the “1950s ironing board gunshot mother” ghost: I think they're both played by the same male actor, Philip Friedman; there's something almost imperceptibly strange that comes from this unexpected casting choice that further off-kilters you, perhaps especially on your first viewing, where its effect I think is nearly subliminal. And of course, layering on top of all of this is the convention that this is not a haunted house film, but a haunted son film. That's a unique twist on the story that we're expecting, and the one we get—until maybe we tug too hard at some of its strings. And that’s why I picked the film.
To hear our take on Insidious, click here.
Bradford Louryk