Insidious (2010)

Movie: Insidious (2010), directed by James Wan

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.20 miles, 8’44”/mile, 01:02:58 (recovery run)

 

James Wan gets me. I don’t know what it is, but his particular brand of “creepy doll scares” can reliably freak me out at least a little. I wouldn’t consider Dead Silence to be an especially good film, for instance, but I love it anyway because the dolls just make me go GAHHHHHHH. Even Billy the Puppet in the Saw movies weirds me out more than I would expect. So when I checked out the clip from Insidious that Netflix uses as a preview and saw that it featured messed-up frozen-faced people in doll-type getups, I knew I should give it a shot.

 

Insidious begins as the husband-and-wife-with-2.4-kids Lambert family moves into their new house. Renai is doing most of the heavy lifting, literally and figuratively: raising her two sons and baby girl leaves her little time to follow her songwriter dreams. Almost immediately, strange things start happening around the house—first it’s little stuff, like books coming off the shelves, but soon son Dalton freaks out while exploring the attic, falls, and winds up in a medically-unexplainable coma. Fast-forward three months, and still-comatose-but-no-one-knows-why Dalton is released from the hospital for home care, which is when the real craziness starts: menacing voices on the baby monitor, bloody handprints on the bedsheets, glimpses of a horrible man peering through the windows. Husband Josh is skeptical when Renai reports these terrifying circumstances, and it isn’t until Renai is actually assaulted by the horrible man that Josh agrees to moving the family into yet another house. When it comes to unfathomable horrors, “moving twice in six months” is high on the list.

 

All is not well, however: it turns out that the ghost sightings and weird events have followed the Lamberts to the new house, and after an investigation by paranormal investigators and the involvement of a psychic, the verdict is in: Dalton is comatose because he astral-projected too far in his sleep and his essence is trapped in “The Further” while evil spirits are trying to take up residence in his vacant body. If you’re starting to get a Poltergeist-y sort of vibe from this description, you’re not wrong—and the comparison only gets more apt, with the minor exception that, surprise! This isn’t a haunted house movie after all. It’s all about Dalton, so the Lamberts can change houses all they want and the problem won’t go away; no matter where you go, there you are. (Or in Dalton’s case, there he isn’t.)

 

Insidious takes one step deeper into Poltergeist territory when Skeptic Dad, now fully convinced of the truth, astral-projects into The Further in order to rescue Dalton and bring him back to his unoccupied body before a demon can squat there. That’s the segment that the Netflix clip comes from, as Josh wends his way through The Further and past lots of restless dead folk in hopes of bring his son back to the land of the living; seems maybe a little problematic and/or spoilery of Netflix, but hey, it roped me in, so I guess it did what it was supposed to. And I guess I can’t claim any high ground on being spoilery, since I’m just going to come right out and say that Insidious also goes the Poltergeist route of “hey everything turned out okay / whoops, spoke too soon,” but that’s so common in the genre that I don’t think anyone’s going to be especially surprised.

 

So do I recommend Insidious? Heck yeah, though your mileage may vary—remember, James Wan gets me. Example: for whatever reason, I don’t usually react to jump scares in horror flicks. It’s not that I see them coming; most likely I’m just dead inside. But Insidious got me with multiple jump scares, and I could not be more pleased about that fact. Additionally, the creep factor is high throughout, so it’s not just the doll people near the end that wig me out. The characters are well-developed and well-acted by a fine cast, so I actually cared about what was happening to them, even though I had to keep fighting off the occasional intrusive thought of “hey, Josh is the pedophile dude from Hard Candy.”

 

Of course, it took me so long to write this that Insidious has left Netflix and I don’t see it on any other services, so now that I’ve told you to check it out, you’d have to shell out a rental fee. Guess I’m the jerk, here. But hey, the movie came out ten years ago and was a big deal back then (I mean, it spawned two sequels), so if you’re into this kind of movie and you don’t live under a rock like I do, the odds are good that you saw it ages ago and are wondering what the heck is wrong with me that I’ve only just seen it for the first time. Touché, buddy. Touché.