Wifey and I are going to the movies tonight. For a long time, we used to go see a movie every week, but over the last couple years our moviegoing has diminished quite a bit. We still try to catch the really big ones, but generally we’ll only go out to the theatre once a month at the most.
Tonight, we wll be seeing Insidious: Chapter 2. I am pretty excited, because Insidious was so much better than I ever would have imagined it to be. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today, because we watched it again last night as a refresher before we check out the sequel, as I had forgotten pretty much everything about it. I thought that I’d made a post about it back when I saw the movie for the first time, but a site search shows otherwise.
Insidious is a horror movie from the creators of Paranormal Activity and Saw. While I do have a morbid fascination with the myriad different ways they come up with to kill people in the Saw flicks, and the first Paranormal Activity is legit spooky, I’m not a fan of either series. Which is fine because Insidious is totally different from either of them. It’s more of a back-to-basics kind of horror movie; it just wants to tell you a spooky story.
The film starts with a couple, Josh and Renai, moving into a new home with their three kids. While goofing around in the attic, the oldest of the kids, Dalton, wangs his head on the floor, sees something spooky offscreen, and doesn’t wake up the next morning. Doctors call it a coma, but have no explanation for it, saying that the head wound didn’t cause any serious damage. The parents are obviously grief-stricken, and Josh starts spending as much time away from home as possible to avoid dealing with all the stress there.
Meanwhile, stuff starts going bump in the night. And in the day too, I guess. Renai hears voices in the baby monitor, the house’s alarm system goes haywire, and spooky figures begin appearing. This all culminates in the family deciding that the house is haunted and moving again. We’re only about half an hour in here, so obviously that does not work.
Eventually Josh’s mom hires them a team of paranormal investigators, and all the pieces start falling into place. I won’t spoil anything here, because this is a movie you probably should actually watch, but I think it’s obvious enough to note (indeed the box is trying to give it away) that it’s actually Dalton that is haunted, which is why the ghostly people are still stalking around the new house.
What I like here is that it takes the usual “haunting” movie trope of the dad/boyfriend not believing that anything supernatural is happening and twists it on its ear. Josh outright denies the problem at hand when the insvestigators lay their theory on him, but comes around within minutes. I was shocked at how suddenly he changed his mind and got the plot rolling. I was all like “Pssh yeah, typical. Of course he’s not gonna believe it” and then WHAM! George Michael out of nowhere. Totally didn’t see it coming.
The entire third act of the movie is really surreal and cool, too. While the first two acts are business as usual, most of the third takes place in a dreamy otherworld, and ends up kind of making me feel like Insidious was a better Silent Hill movie than the actual Silent Hill movie or its tepid sequel. It’s fairly subtle about the horror elements, and gets its spookiness through more with unsettling imagery, foggy darkness, and the gravity of the situation than violence and gore. A lot of the scary stuff in the movie isn’t immediately threatening; it’s frightening because it’s out-of-place and unnatural. It takes the familiar and distorts it, and that kind of mucking around with reality is the kind of horror that I love to see in movies.
One of the really cool things about Insidious is that while it’s a movie about the supernatural, I’m pretty sure that it uses absolutely no special effects. It’s all makeup, camera trickery, and other practical effects. Smoke machines and lighting are used to great effect here, and they do a really great job of setting the scene. At least, this is what I’m assuming. I haven’t researched the film enough to know for certain that they didn’t use special effects, but there aren’t any that are glaringly obvious. There’s also absolutely no gore, if that’s the kind of thing that’ll keep you away from a movie.
I have two problems with the movie. The first is that it takes way too long to get to the more interesting parts of it. Only about a sixth of the movie is spent in the spooky otherworld, and I feel like if they’d given it a little more time to shine, we could have seen some truly scary things in there. As it is, a lot of the frights before that part of the movie are jump scare variants. Admittedly, a lot of them are really good and you won’t see them coming, but still. I will admit that in this case, it’s probably a good thing that they spent most of the movie building up the story and characters.
My second gripe is the ending. Considering that the rest of the movie feels pretty fresh in a fairly stale genre, the ending is all too predicatable and stands out as nothing more than a hook on which to hang their sequel. Then again, I did just literally ask for more otherworld shenanigans, and I suppose the sequel is giving me exactly that. Or at least, that’s what I’m expecting from it. The reviews are not great, but I find that I almost always enjoy movies that I go in wanting to enjoy. And that’s really the secret. That and my “don’t poke holes, just enjoy the ride” mentality.
At the end of the day, I went into Insidious expecting another paint-by-numbers haunting movie, and came out very pleased at the direction it ended up going. It’s not a renaissance for horror movies by any stretch, but it tries earnestly to do its own thing, and I can dig on that. I highly recommend you check it out if you’re big on the genre in general or a specific affinity for old-school horror.
