Flasz On Film

As is the case for many successful horror franchises, it didn’t take long for what began as an innocuous haunted house gig steeped in homage to Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist to grow into something else entirely. With four instalments under its belt, the series had eventually expanded by leaning into exploring its “poltergeistbuster” characters Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell, who also happened to be one of the main co-creators of the series). And at this point, Wan, Whannell and Oren Peli (the Paranormal Activity guy who also produced the series) were facing a difficult dilemma because they could have taken this continually profitable series into several directions. 

At some point, they planned to merge Insidious with the Sinister franchise in what was temporarily called InSinister. They could have simply continued with their anthology approach adopted by Insidious: Chapter 3 and Insidious: The Last Key and turn the series into a string of mostly standalone haunted-house-stroke-demonic-possession stories. However, the series itself wanted to pursue a different direction, as – throughout its various sequels and prequels – it continually reminded the viewer of its firm connection to the narrative foundation it was built upon, i.e. the story of the Lambert family. It is as though it was naturally drawn to bring things home.  

To this end, Patrick Wilson, one of the original leads in Insidious and Insidious: Chapter 2, stepped behind the camera, and brought the entire cast of the 2011 film, as though to imbue this project with a tone of purposeful finality. Working from the script penned by Scott Teems (Firestarter, Halloween Kills) and co-created with Whannell, under Wilson’s direction Insidious: The Red Door reunites the Lambert family as they mourn the passing of Josh’s mother Loraine (Barbara Hershey). As the camera slowly moves between their faces, not only can we recognize that everyone came back to make this movie (Ty Simpkins and Andrew Astor all grown up, and Rose Byrne who looks like she hasn’t aged by a day), but we are also told that the events from the last time we saw them have eventually driven the Lambert family apart. Josh and Renai are divorced and her now adult son Dalton wants absolutely nothing to do with his father, who has been struggling internally for years.  

The seemingly good decision to let Josh and Dalton “forget” about their uncanny ability to astral project – which ended up attracting demonic entities to invade their lives – may have not been the best after all. The long-suppressed past traumas are finally starting to percolate as Dalton, now a young adult, inadvertently reaches to the locked-off exclusion zones of his own identity while trying to express himself as a budding artist. And Josh, after years of white knuckling through life, is also forced to confront the secrets of his past, some of which his own mother may have been keeping from him. Consequently, this entire movie positions itself not as a continuation of an already sprawling series, but as a conclusion to a trilogy. 

While it was an overall great direction to take, staging Insidious: The Red Door as a de facto follow-up to the original and Chapter 2 came with a challenge of living up to the legacy left by James Wan who directed both of those movies. And let’s be honest, you’ll be hard pressed to find a currently active horror filmmaker who’s been able to exert more influence on the genre over the last two decades. At the risk of being hyperbolic, James Wan is likely to be referred to in the future in the same breath as Wes Craven, John Carpenter, George Romero and Tobe Hooper, all of whom I am pretty sure he looks up to by the way. Suffice it to say, the bar is set high, especially for a directorial debutante.  

Fortunately, Patrick Wilson has spent a great deal of time observing Wan behind the camera and ingesting through osmosis his incredibly effective ways of conjuring (sic!) scares, generating threat and immersing the viewer in oppressive atmospheres of omnipresent dread. And quickly becomes apparent that he was an observant student because his turn at the wheel is built clearly with a goal of respecting both the tone and the legacy of Wan’s prior art. It is abundantly clear that Insidious: The Red Door aims to reconnect stylistically with the original movies by way of paying due homage to Wan’s style. Wilson manipulates the camera much like Wan to stretch the rubber band of suspense and threat to its limits, while playfully acknowledging that the filmmaker knows exactly where the line is. He’s a tease in the way he deploys slowly creeping zooms and how he uses the depth of field to manufacture a sense of impending dread.  

For instance, in the beginning of the film when Wilson’s character struggles through an awkward text conversation with his son Dalton, the filmmaker places a figure way out of focus in the background. As we observe Josh, the blurry shape slowly advances towards the camera and, by virtue of capitalizing on the fixed focus, its outlines sharpen ever so slowly as well. As they do so, our own imagination is allowed to run wild and imagine who or what it could be and if it is even real. Then, for a moment, Josh’s head obscures our vision, and we lose track of where the blurry figure is, which is also where we would typically expect a franchise-appropriate jump scare underpinned by rumbling piano, cello and violin. But nothing happens. The figure disappears.  

Something similar happens later in the film when Josh works on regaining his memories using a makeshift matching game and his living room window. A blurry figure appears again outside the house, standing still like an out-of-focus homage to Michael Myers devoid of the iconic musical cue. Then Wilson allows the figure to disappear as Josh covers the window with pictures, and shows the figure is getting closer to the house every time it comes into view. The band of suspense is stretched again and once more our expectations are subverted. But only for a second, because this scenario descends into blood-curdling chaos immediately thereafter.  

Wilson’s acumen when it comes to manufacturing both jump scares and threatening scenarios for his characters (and the audience) to experience is one of the standout features of the movie as a whole. It is an all-round frightening experience that competently draws the viewer into its own nightmarish universe and – through its own devotion to the idea of playing on our imagination – successfully evades the familiar problem of diminishing returns being applied to each successive jump scare or threatening sequence that sees many otherwise successful horror films effectively leave the viewer desensitized and hardened by the time the big finale rolls around.  

No such misfortune here. Insidious: The Red Door manages to pull off what The Conjuring could do a decade ago and keeps the viewer in a more or less consistent state of emotional subjugation, almost to a point where some viewers would likely refuse to partake in the experience and just keep their eyes closed to scale down the energy levels built up by filmmaker’s skilful machinations. It is a truly intense experience that lives up to the legacy of its predecessors.  

More importantly, however, this new addition to the series succeeds in its mission on the back of something even more profound – its innate understanding of what it used to be about and where its true strengths were. On top of the visceral immediacy of scares successfully showcasing that Patrick Wilson can count himself among James Wan’s most apt pupils, Insidious: The Red Door makes a key decision to distance itself from the superfluous ancillary lore which had led the series into a “poltergeistbusters” territory with Chapter 3 and The Last Key, and instead pretends these movies effectively don’t exist. It is as though everyone involved in making this movie somehow knew – or maybe this is Scott Teems’ input based on how the Halloween series managed to circumvent dealing with its own bloated and preposterously chaotic worldbuilding by essentially slashing nearly all of it and reconnecting with the 1978 original Halloween – it was time to bring things back down. Which they did.  

As a result, The Red Door recontextualizes the franchise and brings what it harboured in the subtext – a thematic conversation about hereditary mental illness – firmly to the foreground. In doing so, The Red Door serves as a key with which to go back and reinterpret Insidious as well as Insidious: Chapter 2 because this time round the filmmakers bring their thematic musings into the limelight and focus the entire narrative around the idea of dealing with intergenerational trauma, dealing with a mental ailment, and the frightening idea of seeing a debilitating illness Josh had spent a lifetime understanding resurface in his own son, like a genetic curse. This way, the movie allows the viewer to reconsider their thoughts on the original instalments in the series and perhaps invites them to see them as more than James Wan’s love letter to Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror. 

I strongly believe that thanks to this fundamentally great idea to bring the story back to its roots, convincing the original cast to come back and ditching nearly all goofy ancillaries, Insidious: The Red Door stands proud as one of the strongest entries in the series. Sure, it is goofy at times – as many horrors tend to be to underplay certain stakes, stage interesting scenarios or scares, or even to just introduce bodies to dispatch later – but it is an overall indispensable piece to the Insidious puzzle. In fact, I’d be willing to recommend we collectively hypnotize ourselves into thinking Chapter 3 and The Last Key never happened. Instead, let’s rename The Red Door as Chapter 3 and just agree this series has always been a trilogy in the making.  

This way, the powerful thematic threads woven into the Lambert narrative will shine through most profoundly and the entire series will function as an elevated triptych where a genre template is beautifully deployed to assist a conversation about schizophrenia, men’s innate inability to express their emotions, the importance of communication in building a resilient marriage and our responsibilities towards our offspring who also may not get a say in which of our burdens they’ll end up shouldering well into adulthood.  

This may be controversial, but thanks to Patrick Wilson’s careful approach and the story’s innate drive to look back holistically upon the series, Insidious: The Red Door may be the best and most intellectually accomplished chapter in the Insidious franchise. It’s incredibly rare for a fifth instalment in any series of films, let alone within the heavily parametrized genre of horror, to not only be a breath of fresh air but also an indispensable lens through which the previous chapters will look more defined, purposeful and emotionally charged.