The Insidious Franchise Keeps Going, and Going, and Going
This previous weekend at the box office, the fifth movie in a creaky franchise surprised analysts with a huge opening despite receiving poor reviews and going up against a bunch of expensive blockbusters. I refer to Insidious: The Red Door, the latest entry in a horror series that hadn’t released anything in five years and yet made $32 million domestic in its first weekend, knocking the mega-budgeted Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny out of the top spot. The irony of the competition is that The Red Door is also a nostalgia play of sorts, bringing back the series’ original cast of Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, and Ty Simpkins. But the appeal goes beyond that reliable ensemble—it’s a franchise that endures by delivering goofily sincere scares for a broad audience.
Insidious is one of the many horror series launched by the director James Wan, who was also behind Saw and The Conjuring. Unlike those two long-running franchises, Insidious movies are always rated PG-13, de-emphasizing gory intensity but providing plenty of nasty frights. I’ve long thought of them as training-wheel horror films for that reason; the audience in my screening of The Red Door, indeed, seemed to be entirely composed of teens and 20-somethings, perhaps a heartening thought for an industry struggling to get youngsters into multiplexes.
My biggest takeaway, however, was a mix of admiration and confusion regarding the world of Insidious, which is both simple and convoluted. A good long-running horror series is always balancing the need for effective scares against the need for an essentially coherent internal canon, and the premise of every Insidious movie is basic enough: Some people have the ability to astrally project, entering other dimensions as they sleep. Populating some of these dimensions, particularly one called “The Further,” are a bunch of ghosts and demons (usually bad) who might follow you back to your world.
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The first two films centered on the Lambert family: married couple Josh (played by Wilson) and Renai (Byrne), who learn that their comatose son, Dalton (Simpkins), has accidentally brought some nasties back with him from The Further. Eventually, it’s revealed that Josh has the same astral-projection gift, but his parents hypnotized him when he was a child into forgetting it. This is the simplest way to solve problems in the Insidious franchise, and characters (especially Josh) are always doing it: staring at a metronome, counting backwards from 10, and thus forgetting their latent psychic powers and run-ins with extra-dimensional beasts. Insidious: Chapter 2 saw Josh get possessed by a particular demon and chase his family around the house with a baseball bat. The family’s solution was, foolishly, the same as before: hypnotize both Josh and Dalton into forgetting the whole thing.
Subsequent Insidious films strayed from the Lamberts, instead following the helpful psychic Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) as she dealt with other demonic possessions. But The Red Door picks up nine years after Chapter 2. The family has been torn apart by their buried memories. Josh has divorced Renai and grown estranged from Dalton, who is now an art student painting his repressed visions of the other side. Quickly enough, the hauntings begin again, yet The Red Door strives—like so many recent horror films—to be more than just its jump scares, layering much discussion of family trauma into its script.
What I’ve always enjoyed about the Insidious movies—even a mixed bag like The Red Door—is the old-fashioned campiness of the monsters themselves. Whereas Wan’s sprawling Conjuring-verse usually features ghastly beasties whose limbs all point in different directions, the Insidious fiends have a theatrical air to them, like something out of a Victorian novel. The first film’s most iconic scare involves a demon with a red visage whom fans affectionately call “Lipstick Face”; Chapter 2 mostly centers on a veiled figure called “the Bride in Black.” The Further is suffused with dry ice and is usually navigated with a lantern; it’s all a little Phantom of the Opera.
In The Red Door, though, the monsters take far too long to show up. Instead, the dreaded phantoms stalking our heroes are vague feelings of shame and regret, with Josh trying to figure out how to be a better father to his sullen son while also excavating his own trauma. The scares, when they arrive, are brutish and clanging, overreliant on sudden noises. A Deadline article says the film underwent reshoots to make it “razor-sharp scary,” but the effect is discordant; it seems some cheap frights were slipped into a narrative otherwise aiming for deeper emotional distress. That’s where everything gets a bit convoluted, and less enjoyable.
The Red Door marks Wilson’s directorial debut, with Wan producing. Given the actor’s background in musical theater and his own capability for wonderfully dialed-up performances (especially in another Wan film, Aquaman), I’d hoped that the newest Insidious would lean into high melodrama. But though there are a couple of memorable moments—an inventive fright sequence in an MRI machine, Hiam Abbass showing up as Dalton’s diva of an art teacher—the film ultimately takes itself a little too seriously to be fun, emphasizing the family drama and mostly ignoring the misty Further until the end. As someone who would take Lipstick Face over Buried Patriarchal Trauma any day of the week, I hope the next Insidious movie swings back to the goofy side of things. I am confident that there will be another Insidious, though, which is much more than I can say for a lot of blockbusters.