Haunted Homes: Insidious
Insidious - (2010) Dir. James Wan. Written by, Leigh Whannell. Staring, Patrick Wilson (Josh Lambert), Rose Byrne (Renai Lambert), Ty Simpkins (Dalton Lambert), Andrew Astor (Foster Lambert), Barbara Hershey (Lorraine Lambert), Lin Shayne (Elsie Rainer), Leigh Whannell (Specs), Angus Sampston (Tucker)
A family of five move into a huge, gorgeous house. Shortly after moving in Renai, a song writer and mother of three, who had a recent traumatic experience that necessitated the move, starts to notice things are out of place and disturbed after she leaves a room. Naturally she blames this on her children until one of the children falls from the ladder in an attic and after going to bed that night does not wake up. The child, Dalton, is in an odd coma. Doctors don’t see why he should be in this coma but he is. And that’s when the ghosts start to really hammer at Renai’s sanity. But what if I told you that Renai isn’t actually the central figure of this film? Nor is it the son who can’t wake up? What if the father is the central figure and what if the film decides this more than halfway through the film? Hear that? That’s the sound of at least five more sequels lining up.
I don’t hate this movie, but I feel indifferent to it. James Wan is a good director, he has a really great eye for constructing a horror film. Judging by the opening credits it seems like he wanted to make a high brow ghost story. The artsy black and white photos of empty rooms with added spectral effects is classy with a touch of whimsy. I don’t feel like that mood persists through the film, but it is a very beautifully shot film. Let’s dive into the plot a bit more since it is kind of a different take on haunted homes films.
It turns out that this isn’t about a haunted home, but rather a haunted child. Fun. We find out a little more than halfway through the film that Dalton has the ability to astral project. When he sleeps he can send his soul out of his body and soar around in the sky as he pleases. This is a trait he inherited from his father, Josh Lambert. Josh does not remember this as his mother Lorraine and paranormal investigator/medium Elsie hypnotized Josh to stop him from astral projecting. Turns out that when you do that you start to attract ghosts and other incorporeal entities. They love the energy of the living and while the astral projected soul is flying about it makes the body so much easier to possess. Josh had an old lady trying to take over his body and Dalton has a straight up demon trying to get into him. In order to save Dalton and reunite his soul to his body, Josh has to astral project into “the Further” (a term Elise makes up to describe ghost world) and find his son. In the end Dalton returns but Josh got distracted and the old lady that was haunting him as a child slips into his body killing Elise and scaring Renai before the titles decide to jumpscare us and leave room for part two.
The bulk of the plot happens in the last half of the film. For the first half we have almost a totally different film. A film where we have a woman who is struggling with some unnamed traumatic event trying to piece back together her life. While taking care of her three children, one of which is a baby who cries a lot. The ghosts at the first house don’t seem to be fans of her music so they move her sheet music into the attic. Renai not really believing at this point in spirits is just frustrated and confused. Then the ghost at this house starts to get very vocal. Talking on a baby monitor in a really chilling scene and then yelling loudly as a jump scare. Renai starts seeing the ghosts, usually they are staying near the baby, Clair. Around this point Dalton goes into his coma and his younger brother Foster starts saying that he is scared of his brother, especially when he walks around the house at night. Renai finds a bloody claw print on Dalton’s bed sheets and makes a very reasonable decision: they need to move. Sadly on the very first day of moving in when Renai is by herself she chases a ghost of a small child around the house. Where is Josh during all of this? Avoiding the house. Even while they were still at the first house Josh would make excuses that he had to grade tests late into the night. It is very apparent that he was more scared than Renai and just not handling it or willing to admit out loud that anything was wrong. That’s the B plot that is front loaded into the film and quickly dropped when we find out that Josh and Dalton have magical powers. None of the questions I have about Renai were answered. What was the traumatic experience she had that stopped her from making music and made them have to move to a new house to try a fresh start? Why does she have a lot of books on musical therapy? Will the knowledge she has from those books help at all? To have the first half of the film focus on Renai and then drop her almost completely for the actionpacked spook house section of film is frustrating. I haven’t seen the follow up films yet so maybe some of this is explained later.
Josh seems to be a fun dad. But the type of fun dad that has two roles in the family. Discipline and making jokes and goofing around with his kids. Renai does all the hard work. She is shown in a hectic dance of getting breakfast for the family and keeping the kids in line and Josh just pops down after waking up later and taking a nice long shower to pat his kids on the head and then off to work as a teacher. Which, let’s be honest, there is no way a teacher could afford the HUGE house they started in or the more quaint but just as large second house. Either he came into an inheritance or Renai did, or before Renai’s inspiration for writing songs dried up she managed to make a hefty sum on selling a few songs. I really want to believe that Renai is the one that somehow has made the money for the family. It makes the moment where Josh throws his issues into her face. Prior to the move he explained his working late was to make money since he was the only one working, a thing he was ok with a few months before when Renai thanked him for letting her take some time to get recentered before returning to work (whatever work that was). Then later in the film when Josh is shutting down the paranormal investigation because he feels it is exploitative (it probably is to be fair) and Renai asks if he believes her or not he just answers, “I moved us twice when you asked isn’t that enough?” I don’t like Josh, and I think we are meant to sympathize with him.
The rest of the family don’t really play too much into things. Dalton is in a coma most of the film. When he isn’t he’s adorable and inquisitive. Foster is… his brother, and Clair is a baby that is very loud, to the point that they comment on at the start of the film. When Dalton goes into a coma you really feel for Renai, as she has to learn how to change his IV and insert a feeding tube from a nurse after Dalton returns home. Renai is shattered and deadened by this point and her husband still avoids everything until he is forced to get his child out of “the Further.”
The “Further” section of the film had some very interesting bits. We see a small vignette of a family that gets murdered by a creepy smiling woman. That section was a lovely little short in its own right. We also get to see the demon trying to take over Dalton’s body. Oh boy is this demon high camp. We see a glimpse early of the demon behind Josh and it’s a jump scare eek fest. But when we finally see the demon he is in a room overlooking the room Dalton’s soul is chained up in. The demon is blasting Tiny Tim’s Tiptoe Through the Tulips while using an industrial grinding machine to sharpen his talons. His room is filled with marionettes and the lighting is circus orange. It is a hilarious contrast to the spooky blue hued “the Further” we went through before this. The whole “the Further” section feels like an old amusement park haunted house ride, and at times a little like a video game. Like the rest of the film it has its high and low points.
I feel like this film was made to prove that James Wan could do more than just launch the Saw franchise. It very much has a different feel than Saw. It feels closer to the two Conjuring films he directed later, yet it lacks the amount of weird fun that his 2021 film Malignant called forth. I didn’t hate the film but it doesn’t make me want to go through the full series. Maybe one day, but not anytime soon.
