Insidious (2011)
"It's not the house that's haunted. It's your son."
From the moment those words were first spoken by Lin Shaye in the trailer for Insidious, they formed one of the most memorable quotes in the history of modern horror. However, it isn't entirely accurate. The implication is that Insidious would offer a more original take on the haunted-house subgenre, and while it is accurate that the ghosts, demons, and parasites which plague the Lambert family are attached specifically to their oldest son rather than the houses they inhabit, the supernatural antics written by Leigh Whannell and directed by James Wan fall squarely in line with the tropes of your typical haunted-house excursion. On a purely conceptual level, the plot of Insidious adheres firmly to the standard blueprint of the haunted-house horror story.
Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne), a married couple, move into a new home with their three young children: oldest son Dalton (Ty Simpkins), middle son Foster (Andrew Astor), and their infant daughter, Cali (Brynn and Madison Bowie). On their second night, Dalton wanders off from his family to explore the attic, and after stepping on the unstable step of a ladder in an attempt to turn on the light, the step gives way and Dalton falls on the floor, hitting his head. The next morning, he doesn't wake up. Three months later, Dalton remains in a coma that his doctors cease to explain. His brain scans show no damage. It's as though he fell asleep and simply can't wake up.
Josh and Renai decide to bring him home so he may hopefully recover in the comfort and familiarity of his bedroom, and around this time is when the formulaic paranormal activity rears its ugly head. Renai hears unsettling noises such as aggressive mannish whispers on her baby monitor, shadowy figures lurk behind window curtains, a black-caped man paces up and down outside the bedroom, ghoulish faces manifest behind windows, baby Cali repeatedly wakes up crying after only a half hour of sleep as though someone or something is tormenting her as soon as Renai leaves the room, doors open and close on their own free will, and a rocking horse follows suit.
However, Whannell distinguishes his fundamentally hoary fright fest by making his protagonists intelligent flesh-and-blood human beings who react credibly to the maelstrom of horror in which they find themselves. Renai is commendably forthright about her ghostly encounters, confiding them to Josh almost as soon as they begin, and Josh subverts the trope of the "disbelieving dad" by simply believing his wife, listening to her, and agreeing to move yet again into another new house. Renai consults a priest, and she and her supportive mother-in-law, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), hire a psychic named Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) to rescue Dalton. Josh and Renai are two sides of the same coin: she's the spiritually accepting believer while he's the reasonable skeptic who initially dismisses Elise's otherworldly assertions as an emotionally manipulative scam. Only two scenes later, Josh calls Elise and her team back after finding confirmatory drawings that have been hidden in plain sight all along on Dalton's bedroom wall. Whannell and Wan raise the emotional stakes by keeping Dalton, a preteen child, in a coma for the majority of the 102-minute runtime and sensitively depicting the psychological torment it causes his parents.
While the elements of Whannell's script are fairly boilerplate, it's in the technical craftsmanship of Wan and his cinematographers, John R. Leonetti and David M. Brewer, where Insidious transcends its unoriginality. Their visual style is eerily marvelous. Leonetti and Brewer desaturate the color palette to a nearly monochromatic extent, imbuing Insidious with a haunting old-school ambience. The story takes place in the present, but visually, it feels as though it could be the 1970s or 80s. Wan takes his time acquainting us with the Lambert family and documenting their day-to-day activities before unleashing the parade of demonic jump scares. He lives up to his film's title, insidiously ratcheting up a stifling atmosphere of suspense and apprehension at an unhurried pace through slow pan and tracking shots. Two of the latter in particular stand out.
One tracking shot down an unlit hallway doubles as a POV shot of Lorraine's nightmare as she walks into Dalton's bedroom and, upon pushing the door all the way open, sees the silhouette of a demonic entity standing beside his bed in the corner, which points a clawed finger at Dalton when asked what it wants. Another tracks Renai in the daytime as she takes out the trash in her new home. After she walks outside, the camera remains inside and voyeuristically observes her through a series of windows. Renai stops and looks into her living room, and a wide POV shot shows a little boy in 1920s garb (Ben Woolf) dancing to Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." The camera glides across the outer wall, and upon reaching the next window, the little boy has vanished. It's easily the creepiest moment and visual in all of Insidious.
In the opening scenes, Leonetti and Brewer treat us to a tour of the Lamberts' first new home by panning slowly across the living room full of moving boxes, visually signifying that they've just moved in. They use a high-angle shot to show Renai staring up toward Cali's bedroom while holding the baby monitor to her ear, listening to a whispery voice on the other end state that it "want[s] it NOW!" A couple simple shots of misplaced items subtly hint at a supernatural invasion without yet outright confirming it: a pile of Renai's books lies on the floor beside their shelf, Renai's box of sheet music has been transferred to the off-limits attic. Whatever this entity is, it seems to have a particular hard spot for Renai, or perhaps women in general.
Where Leonetti and Brewer really let their creativity shine is in their construction of The Further, which, from the outside, replicates the actual Lambert house. Once inside, however, it morphs into a funhouse duplicate, a labyrinthine maze suffused with fog, utterly devoid of light, its perpetual blackness illuminated solely by the baby-blue glow of a lantern. So much of the climactic portion takes place in such darkness that it becomes a challenge to discern everything that's happening. In contrast to the black and blue color palette of the Lamberts' Further home, the lair of the primary demon, Lipstick Face (Joseph Bishara), is shot in the hellfire red of innumerable candles that resemble Carrie White's home when she returns from the prom. Regarding their presentation of the Lipstick-Face Demon, Leonetti and Brewer depict him in glimpses to offer a sufficiently vivid look at his face while preserving an aura of mystery: a close-up of his golden-yellow eyes behind a magnifying glass; a sudden manifestation of his face behind Josh to jump-scare Lorraine; a POV shot of him sitting behind an obscure-glass window.
They use slow zooms to highlight the emotions of the characters, especially the invariably expressive Renai, zooming in slowly on her attentive, terrified, or despondent face. Their zooms don't end at the characters, either, zooming in on an ajar bedroom door to tease the demonic figure potentially lurking behind it, or an active baby monitor from which a whispery voice emanates. Speaking of doors, Leonetti and Brewer derive a good deal of mileage from them, pushing them open slowly to reveal a spindly demon standing beside a child's bed in the corner or, just as unsettlingly, nothing at all behind a mysteriously active rocking horse.
Acting as his own co-editor, Wan and Kirk Morri crosscut seamlessly between Josh's astral, conscious body wandering in the Further in pursuit of Dalton and his physical body lying unconscious in a living room chair in the real world, surrounded by his loved ones. Unfortunately, when assistance arrives in the form of Elise and her two younger, nerdy male assistants, Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), around 47 minutes in, the preceding atmosphere of foreboding and alienation subsides beneath a mound of verbal exposition. The core concept is undeniably fascinating. Dalton possesses the ability of astral projection. Every night when he sleeps, his spirit disconnects from his body and is enabled to explore otherworldly dimensions. His whole life, he assumed these were just dreams, and so he drew pictures of his experiences, but never shared them with his parents. But now, due to his innate fearlessness, Dalton has wandered too far and become lost in the Further, a dark dimension that houses the most vengeful spirits who seek to possess Dalton's body to gain reentrance into the real world.
Unfortunately, in execution, this explanatory second half gets repetitive and visually incoherent. Watching Specs and Tucker set up cameras around the house, and listening to Elise explain the cause of Dalton's condition to Josh and Renai, is a little boring. Dalton's still-unconscious body smacks a hand down on a table around which his parents and the trio of psychics are gathered, causing them to fly out of their seats. Dalton smacks Specs across the face, causing him to fly across the room. The Lipstick-Face Demon tosses Josh across a room. Josh and an unthreatening, long-haired, Fabio-looking fiend (J. LaRose) tussle in such vision-impairing darkness that it's hard to tell who has the upper hand at any given point. That is, until Josh pushes him with all his strength, causing him to, you guessed it, fly away into the ether. So much of the climax consists of characters getting tossed around like ragdolls that the horror registers more as loud and chaotic rather than genuinely frightening. On the plus side, Wan and Morri smartly use reaction shots to emphasize the contrasting reactions of Josh—disbelieving and uncomfortable—and Renai—accepting, devastated, a tear tracing a course down her cheek—to Elise's long-winded and far-fetched explanation of astral projection.
Joseph Bishara pulls double duty both in front of the camera as the Lipstick-Face Demon and behind it as the composer. Regarding his latter position, Bishara relies on the two most horror-friendly instruments: a violin and piano. His violin score is effectively screechy to set you on the edge of your seat, and he punctuates the demonic activity with loud piano bangs, as though he's literally slamming his hands on piano keys. It's simple, jarring, and powerfully scary. He also makes chilling use of Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," exploiting its inherent creepiness due to the juxtaposition of its singer's castrato-esque soprano voice and the innocence of its lyrics.
In the scariest scene, this song suddenly replaces the music that was playing on Renai's record player, indicating a demonic presence has invaded her new home, and later returns in the Lipstick-Face Demon's lair as he works (although what he's working on, I'm not sure). This is a smart choice on Wan and Whannell's part because, rather than play the song randomly just to augment a ghostly encounter with creepy music, they tether it personally to their antagonist as his favorite song.
Of the seven actors instructed to truly act throughout Insidious, the greatest performance emerges from Rose Byrne. She's the MVP. The bulk of the acting weight rests upon her frail shoulders, and she carries it with a stunning, stellar performance that should have garnered her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Wan's primary direction for Byrne is similar to William Friedkin's for Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist: to react to the horrifying supernatural phenomena surrounding her. While her performance is less physically exacting than Burstyn's—who had to emit guttural screams, have her face shoved into her daughter's bloody vagina, and get slapped across the face—Byrne is heartbreaking and fully committed, putting on a career-defining showcase using her face and body language.
She conveys petrifying fear in a series of wide-eyed, slack-jawed facial expressions that give Justin Long in Jeepers Creepers a run for his money, as well as the maternal anguish, frustration, and helplessness of a young mother whose son has slipped into an undiagnosed coma from which he inexplicably refuses to wake up. Byrne makes the haunted-house scares register thanks to her authentic reactions to them, at one point curling up on the floor and breaking down in tears, her head resting on her knees.
Even in her quieter, less hectic (and less supernatural) moments, including the first official shot in which Renai is woken out of her sleep by Josh's obnoxious snoring, Byrne uses her fatigued, mournful eyes to paint a three-dimensional portrait of a woman who sacrificed her career as a pianist and singer-songwriter for motherhood. Renai is now a homemaker who loves her family more than anything but feels suffocated by the demands of her motherly duties: cooking breakfast for five people, screaming on the phone for an agent to speak to about a billing issue, driving the kids both to and from school. Even though she's in a loving marriage with Josh, Renai privately grapples with emotional loneliness and inadequacy. While Josh is away in the daytime, working as a teacher to pay Dalton's medical bills and keep his family afloat, Renai stays home with the baby, utilizing her fleeting moments of peace and quiet to sing her songs at the piano, allowing Byrne to showcase a beautiful and soothing voice. Byrne's beautifully expressive eyes well with tears of desperation as a doctor ceases to explain the cause behind Dalton's coma, her line deliveries strained with exhaustion and hopelessness.
Prior to her role as Elise Rainier, Lin Shaye's claim to fame was as Nancy Thompson's English teacher in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, immortalized for her line, "You'll need a hall pass." 27 years later, Insidious would bring Shaye into the spotlight and showcase her immense horror credentials. On the page, Shaye is dealt a thankless hand; Elise is a cliché, plain and simple. The seen-it-all-before psychic who is able to explain what's happening, why, and how to resolve it. Whannell doesn't enrich her with a backstory to shed light on what led to her current career in the paranormal arts, or personal desires beyond helping tormented families. On a scriptual level, Elise Rainier is a white equivalent to Jezelle Gay Hartman from Jeepers Creepers.
Fortunately, in the same vein as Patricia Belcher, Shaye inhabits the cliché like nobody's goddamn business, investing Elise's expository monologues of astral projection, the motivations of the Lipstick-Face Demon, and the solution to Dalton's entrapment with conviction and heartfelt emotion. Coming from a lesser actress' mouth, these explanations would have come across as convoluted and silly; from Shaye's, they're made remarkably plausible, intelligible, and absorbing. When Elise isn't explaining, and is directed to react to a horrifying image, Shaye registers abject horror in her intense, widening eyes.
Patrick Wilson isn't on equal ground with either of his more committed female co-stars, but that's partially because Josh doesn't serve a vital purpose until the final act when he projects himself into the Further. Prior to that, he largely removes himself from the horror at home, leaving Renai alone to deal with the brunt of it. Nonetheless, Wilson delivers a solid performance, portraying Josh as an affectionate, cool, even-tempered father who hugs his sons when he comes home from work and kisses them goodbye on his way thereto. He's caring but not overprotective, stern when necessary (like forbidding Dalton from going up into the attic after he falls and hurts his leg), healthily skeptical about supernaturalism without being apathetic to his wife's distress. As his life crumbles around him, Josh withdraws, burying himself in his work as a teacher, staying overnight in his classroom to grade tests.
Wilson conveys his inner conflict between wanting to comfort Renai and follow his gut instinct to buy into the supernatural diagnosis, and remain grounded in the security of reality. Josh desperately wants to believe in a rational, medical explanation behind Dalton's coma, even though, three months later, the doctors uniformly fail to provide one. Wilson's most moving moment is a private bedside interaction in which Josh tearfully asks his comatose son where he's truly gone to. Wilson shares a tender, lived-in chemistry with Byrne, evinced in the unforced intimacy of their embraces, kisses, and bedside banter. His weakest moment is a confrontation between Josh and his childhood nemesis, the Bride in Black (Philip Friedman), who smiles at him tauntingly from behind a mirror; Wilson's repeated delivery of "Get away from me!" is unconvincing and flat. As for the youngest Lambert children, Foster is just "Dalton's younger brother," the middle child who serves no narrative purpose and is left almost entirely out of the mayhem, and baby Cali is obviously exactly that: a newborn baby.
Leigh Whannell gifts himself the supporting role of sketch artist Steven "Specs" Fisher, and in conjunction with his onscreen partner, Angus Sampson, they provide a sprinkle of comic relief through their lighthearted banter and petty power struggle. From the moment Specs and Tucker arrive at the Lamberts' doorstep, their appearances alone mitigate the air of tension. Both wear a white button-down shirt with a black tie, feeding into the nearly black-and-white aesthetic while highlighting the humorous degree of formality with which they treat their job. Tucker compromises the oh-so seriousness of his dead-eyed stare by casually eating a hot pocket in front of his new clients; the urgency of ghost-busting is no match for his appetite.
Far more entertaining than their actual work is their childlike interplay, as Specs and Tucker frequently contradict and one-up each other. Specs pulls out a normal-sized flashlight; Tucker pulls out an oversized one. Tucker thinks that his pictures will be the main selling point of Specs' hypothetical book, to which Specs passive-aggressively replies, "Not the main selling point, but they'll definitely be important." "A picture's worth a thousand words," says Tucker. "Yeah, but words are worth a thousand words too," Specs retorts. Upon realizing that neither of them monitored the Lamberts' previous home, Specs and Tucker bicker about who should do it, either to impress Elise or satisfy their own egos.
Of the gallery of parasitic demons and discontent ghosts who inhabit the stylishly rendered Further, only two stand out as visually terrifying entities: the cleverly named Lipstick-Face Demon and the Bride in Black. The makeup and costuming for both is simple and effective. Lipstick Face is a standard-looking demon distinguished by his titular embellishment. From head to toe, his slender, naked body is pitch-black, with the exception of his yellow eyes. But his face is smeared sloppily with lipstick, meaning his mostly fire-red face is interspersed with patches of charred-black skin. It's as though he picked up a lipstick one day and, not content to color within the boundary of his lips, cheerfully went haywire on his face. (Maybe a transgender demon?) Like Freddy Krueger, his fingers are clawed, his feet hooved. Though not a central antagonist, as he only appears in the background of Polaroid photos and in the climax, the Bride in Black leaves an indelible imprint, wearing a black wedding dress, a veil over his white makeup-painted face, and black lipstick on his eerily grinning lips. Clearly, the filmmakers have a theme going on by making their two scariest male entities embellish their appearances with feminine products and wardrobes.
As for the remaining spirits who reside in the Further, they appear generally human-looking, albeit with pale faces. That's their only ghostly touch. One is a fat man in a bowtie sitting on a sofa reading a newspaper. Another is a seamstress in the middle of ironing. These ghouls smile creepily but cause no physical harm to their still-living visitors. Wan deploys them largely for jump scares, e.g., having them pop up in front of Josh or Tucker with a prolonged wide-eyed smile.
Despite the fact that Insidious is a technically original supernatural horror film, it shares deep connections with three others of its ilk, one of which was two years into the future at the time of its release: Poltergeist, The Entity, and The Conjuring. First and foremost, Whannell was clearly inspired by Poltergeist while drafting Insidious, as the narrative threads are far too similar to be coincidental. We have a family of two parents and three children living in a relatively new home. A preteen child makes contact with an otherworldly dimension, and is abducted and held prisoner within by a malignant entity. Carol Anne was physically transported whole to her new dimension; Dalton's astral spirit is abducted into the Further, while his physical body remains unconscious in his home. A female psychic shows up to offer help and emotional support to the tortured family, accompanied by a team of assistants. One of the parents must infiltrate the supernatural realm alone and free their child from their captor's grip.
Whannell and Wan take a more artful lesson from their inspiration's screenplay, carving out enough space to develop the family and their intimate relationship before thrusting them into a paranormal nightmare. It makes all the difference in endearing them to us and allowing the scares to pack a punch. 29 years after starring in The Entity as the tortured protagonist, Carla Moran—a hardworking single mother who gets repeatedly raped by a trio of invisible demons—it makes sense that Wan would cast Barbara Hershey in the supporting role of Lorraine Lambert, a mother with a lifetime of experience with the supernatural.
In addition to feeling like an unofficial remake of Poltergeist, Insidious more so feels like a dry run for The Conjuring, an infinitely superior supernatural horror film in which a family moves into a haunted house, one member is gradually possessed by a demon, and a team of demonologists are called in to save the day. The most direct link between the two is Patrick Wilson, who Wan would cast as his leading man once more as a husband and father going to battle with a relentless demon to save the soul of its latest target. Only this time, Wilson's role doubles as the ghost hunter, making Ed Warren a hybrid of Josh Lambert and Elise Rainier. In place of Rose Byrne is Vera Farmiga, whose character is named Lorraine, same as Josh's mother. Likewise, Wan would recruit Joseph Bishara to reprise his dual position as The Conjuring's composer and primary demonic antagonist, Bathsheba Sherman.
With The Conjuring, Wan would refine the skill he employed to reinvigorate the familiar elements of Insidious' story, assisted by a superior script from the Hayes brothers, but one thing is made certain by both films: when it comes to directing horror, haunted-house fright fests that rely on steadily mounting suspense, flawlessly timed jump scares, and compassionate explorations of characters' psychological anguish—rather than torture pornos that necessitate imprisoned characters to saw their own limbs off for survival—represent Wan's wheelhouse.
6.4/10
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