Insidious - Out Of The Further

The Further Adventures...

Insidious - Out Of The Further
Directed by Jacob Chase
Australia/USA 2026
Blumhouse
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Okay then... another Insidious movie, namely Insidious - Out Of The Further and, well, it’s actually quite good in many respects, even though the franchise is now pretty much divorced from its original creator other than a production credit. Which means, of course, that Elise’s two assistants from the previous movies are no longer with us. 

But, hey, Elise is... as played by the 83 year old Lin Shaye and, yeah, that actress is still kicking ass in this movie. Elise is still dead, of course... but as usual, she’s helping out people from her unique place in The Further, the realm between life and death where the evil entities that plague the various corporeal, human inhabitants of these films live. And, since her two regular helpers are not in this installment (she’s the only character/actress to appear in all six movies to date), we’re introduced to a new, physical world helper in the form of Clare, played by Maisie Richardson-Sellers... and she’s a likeable enough character and the actress does a good job on selling her here, even though she’s really only brought in for the last third of the movie.

Okay, so this film focuses on a new family, three generations of daughters headed up by main protagonist Gemma (played by Amelia Eve), her daughter Maya (played incredibly well by Island Austin) and her own mother Ingrid (played by Laura Gordon). We initially see Ingrid die in a violent fashion in front of the young version of Gemma in the past. This is followed by the usual, big Insidious title coming up with the ferocious, atonal music accompanying it but, either my cinema had rubbish sound or it was pretty dialled back this time around. It didn’t startle me like they usually, quite purposefully do. 

And if I had a criticism of this film in general it’s that it does go through all the usual tricks of the trade of the modern horror film, like showing you where you think the scare is going to come from or shifting the audio landscape to not-quite-subconsciously herald in another intense scene... but it somehow manages to be completely unscary this time around. I don’t think it’s me but... this film did feel somehow less stressful than any of the other movies in the franchise and... I wonder if that’s down to the director over anything else? 

There are, though, some unsettling moments for a certain sector of the audience, I reckon... Gemma grows up to be a dentist and there is a full on ‘dental horror’ scene in this. It wasn’t particularly scary for me but it was inventive in what it reveals about one of the characters. I could see how it might set some people’s teeth on edge if they have a quite understandable fear of dentistry (I’m personally in a good spot with my dentist these days so... maybe that’s why I found it less distressing). 

My second criticism took the form of an homage scene and, my problem is it didn’t go far enough. So you remember the eye slowly being pulled towards a big, sharp splinter and then being gouged out in Zombi (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters, reviewed here)? Well, a similar scene but using a much cleaner, sharper instrument is restaged here in reference... except the director seems to have an eye on the censors and it doesn’t quite get to the eye gouging. But that would have been nice to see in a modern movie, for sure... especially since the victim is also the main protagonist here. That would have really shocked the audience if she’d lost an eye and helped build the kind of ‘the gloves are off’ momentum that the film needed.

But. like I said, the film is pretty entertaining and a fair bit better than Insidious - The Red Door (reviewed here), especially because Lin Shaye has more of a role this time around. 

And that’s me done with Insidious - Out Of The Further. I thought this was a fine addition to the franchise and, I think if fans give it a chance, they should be into it too. It does open up a possibility of having sequels that are not just centred around the same family from the first five movies and I thought it did that in a more than credible manner. I just wish the scares could have been ramped up a notch. Oh, and stay for the mid credits scene and especially because, during those credits, you can hear in more detail something that composer Joseph Bishara does in the movie too... which is go into the realms of John Carpenter style scoring, specifically The Fog, at some points. So that’s cool too. 

Insidious - The Red Door

Further More

Insidious -
The Red Door
Directed by Patrick Wilson
Canada/USA  2023 Screen Gems
UK cinema release print

Okay, so despite the first movie in the series being yet another ‘inspired by but not owning up to it’ reworking of the Little Girl Lost episode of The Twilight Zone, I do quite like the Insidious movies and have been happy to go see each one as they hit the cinemas. So now we’re up to the fifth chapter in the ongoing series, Insidious - The Red Door. This one is mostly not written by Leigh Whannell as far as I can tell (the IMDB seems a bit conflicted with this information in a couple of different sections) but he does still do a cameo as his character from the previous movies in this, as does both his ghostbusting partner Angus Simpson and, in two big cameo spots, Lin Shaye... who I was hoping would have a much bigger role in it this time around.

This movie is set nine years after the events of the first film and features the main male lead Patrick Wilson (who also directed this installment as his debut behind the camera) as Josh and, now college aged but still played by the original actor who was a boy in the first couple of films, Ty Simpkins as his son Dalton (his brother is played by Andrew Astor, who also reprises his role for this movie). Then we have Rose Byrne back as Josh’s ‘now ex’ wife and a newcomer in the form of Dalton’s new college buddy/potential girlfriend played by Sinclair Daniel.

This one sees a rift has developed between father and son in the years since they were both hypnotised to forget their involvement and terrifying experiences in The Further, the parallel realm to this one which haunts them in both their corporeal forms and their astral explorer forms. Both are plagued by visions with their suppressed memories starting to break loose and manifest new horrors upon them... with the film following the two individually as they fail to connect in real life, until they are rebonded accidentally in the next ‘scary movie encounter’ in The Further, linking them right back to their earlier experiences.

And it’s an okay film. It’s not the best in the franchise for sure and, I think I find it somewhat lacking in terms of story more than anything else. Patrick Wilson proves himself a very good director, working with the material he’s been given and I was especially impressed by a scene where nothing much happens but the whirs and clicks of an old microfiche reader (I’ve never heard one make those sounds) are used to punctuate jump cuts as the camera is repositioned a little closer to him and his subject matter at each click.

And it’s got some good enough jump scares in the movie too. Once more, it’s all about what the audience sees and expects which dictates the way the camera points, often calling to attention differences in shots of familiar terrain. So the audience can see a door has been opened between shots where the character can’t for instance... or the presence of a man behind a truly contrived presentation of a classic memory game is getting closer each time Josh uncovers a panel of a set of windows. So, yeah, in some ways the film is predictable about when the scares are going to come... and how they’re going to come (I didn’t expect full on face vomiting in this one, for sure) but it doesn’t really stop the jumps being fairly successful and, with Joseph Bishara’s typical score to back up the film, it all works pretty well.

I have three main disappointments with the film though, which I’ll briefly elaborate here. One is that the endless array of scary set pieces don’t follow a particularly complex or interesting narrative. If you’ve seen the previous installments, you’ll know what’s going on and there’s not much story development in this one, it has to be said. So I did find it a kind of an empty bunch of scary moments in a bag, ultimately.

Secondly, after Lin Shaye’s character Elise’s death in the second one (plus her wonderful, much more leading roles in the two prequels), I was hoping she would be back in a big way. We know she’s in The Further (as this film reminds us) so I was hoping for a series of movies where she and her two ghostbusting co-workers would be working a horror mystery from each dimension, communicating through some kind of link. Instead, the three characters really are just cameos so... yeah... that was a shame.

Thirdly, there’s a truly great new character, an art teacher called Professor Armagan, played by Hiam Abbass. It’s set up like she’s going to be a new mentor character in place of the deceased Elise (or at least that's what it seemed like to me) and the actress herself has amazing screen presence in this role. Alas, both actress and character are wasted in here, in what amounts to just a couple of scenes. I think the writer should have done more with this character.

Other than those slight grumbles though, yeah, if you like the previous Insidious movies then Insidious - The Red Door should give you another good time at the cinema. As I type this, the news has come in that it’s beaten the new Indiana Jones movie (reviewed here) at the box office and, yeah, I think a lot of people (myself included) are in shock that Indy didn’t do a lot better. All I will say is that, despite there only being seven people in this screening (so I don’t know how it managed to snag the figures it has), I’m guessing that this one is appealing to a younger target audience than Mr. Jones. And, I suspect, that’s the generation that, rightly or wrongly, are much less frightened about going out and catching Covid from a cinema trip. So maybe those box office figures aren’t such a large surprise after all.

Insidious - The Last Key (Insidious 4)

Insidiouself At home

Insidious - The Last Key (Insidious 4)
2018 USA/Canada Directed by Adam Robitel
UK cinema release print.

I’ve quite enjoyed the Insidious movies as they’ve been released into cinemas so far. Starting with the weakest and least compelling of the series, the original Insidious (reviewed here) was more or less an expansion/remake of the old Little Girl Lost episode of The Twilight Zone. However, both Insidious Chapter 2 (reviewed here) and Insidious Chapter 3 (reviewed here), just like The Purge franchise, took ideas from the concept pitched in that first installment and created much more enthralling and entertaining pictures out of them.

Now one of the important things about what those sequels came to be and what they are, thankfully, continuing to be in the prequel movies (parts 3 and 4) is something which I pointed out in my last review from the series and its something horror seems to do better than certain other genres... change peoples attitudes to what it's possible to portray and get accepted in mainstream movies, by stealth. And by that I mean that what we have in these last couple of films is not just a female action hero carrying the main protagonist role (which is no mean feat by itself) but, also, a 75 year old female action hero (in the form of Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier)  who is wandering around banishing demons and generally getting thrown around by them in a Marvel comics kind of way. I honestly applaud and support these films for this... where else in Hollywood are they giving action roles to heroines who are living past their seventh decade?  So yeah, I wish these films well.

Now, the bad news for me was that this was another prequel to the first two movies, being set chronologically in between the first prequel, Insidious Chapter 3 and the very first Insidious. In fact, this one is set just weeks/days before the events of original film, at the point where Elise enters the narrative of that particular supernatural adventure. Now I was hoping that this installment would finally be a sequel to the end of the second Insidious movie, where the now dead Elise is still looking after her two sidekicks in the form of Specs and Tucker (played in this one again by the film’s writer Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson) from the other side of the spiritual realm known in this series as ‘the further’ and sees something there so terrifying that we need to know who she’s seen.  Alas, the answer to that one is not tackled here, either but, at least the film does take us right up to the first one chronologically so, who knows, if this one does well enough at the box office (it certainly deserves to) then hopefully the writers will have nowhere left to go other than carrying on from that moment in time at the end of the second.

Either way, this is another strong entry in the series which, although I didn’t prefer it as much as the previous two, still entertains and brings the scares when it needs to... not so many scares, for sure but, when it gets those shock moments right, it really manages to get the jump on the audience. Actually, I found it amusing from the chuckles of anticipation and the pent up tension in the auditorium of the screening I went to, mostly from teenage couples, that the horror film is still very much, in some ways, a kind of ‘rites of passage’ experience. I could almost see the hormones bubbling up in some of the couples sitting in my nearest proximity.

So the film starts off with an extended flashback into Elise’s childhood and we begin to see, in this and other flashbacks and, also, in those moments where adventures in ‘the further’ overlap in shifting time zones, how Elise came to be the person she is at the time of this story. We learn just what kind of burden she carries around with her, too... as we meet her family at various points in time. It’s also a nice bit of writing that some of the revelations we find out about Elise’s past are also news to her and we see how she reacts to these reveals as we respond to them ourselves.

The movie goes gets straight to the point with all the supernatural stuff here and, although there are the obvious suspenseful, drawn out scenes of lurking dread in the mix, there is no slow build up reveal to the first presence of the ghostly apparitions and, although this approach maybe shouldn’t work so well, the director seems to really get away with it very well here. It's very rapidly paced and there’s a lot crammed in. Even some of the editing is judicious with short cuts like watching Elise walk through a door in relative close up, towards the camera and then, in the next master shot, cutting to her already being halfway through the next room. It’s something which, perhaps, should seem a little out of place here, when timing in these kinds of films is a crucial element but... nope... it all works quite well and the frights don’t lose too much impact in the scenes which matter in terms of jump scares.

There’s a wonderful sequence where Elise is going through a ventilator shaft (much like Dallas in the first of Ridley Scott’s ALIEN films) and she finds her way blocked in a couple of sections by piles of suitcases. As she goes through each pile, unlocking and opening as she goes, she finds sinister contents I won't reveal here and, as she does so, we are made aware of the old ‘sinister demonic ghost's point of view’ approaching one of the suitcase from behind. Each time Elise has a case lid up, shielding her view of the rest of the shaft in front of her, the ‘ghost camera’ saunters up from behind the lid and, as we cut back to Elise closing it, we assume that something is going to be there with her as she shuts the lid to reveal it and... each time she does it, nothing is revealed. And then, after a few of these cases, we get the expected jump scare but, because the director has deftly used the old clichéd horror syntax of manipulating expectations through shot movement, the audience is effectively blinded by those expectations of just where that ‘attack’ is going to come from. So, yeah, there’s some nice stuff happening here.

We also get a possible set up for a worthy successor to Elise and, it will be interesting to see whether, if they do decide to pick up the hanging thread from the end of the second movie, they bring back this character introduced here to act as the ‘conduit person’ between Elise in ‘the further’ and the real world. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly what this character’s function is here, if the writer and producers are thinking far enough ahead.

As far as bad stuff here... well, two things really.

Once again, composer Joseph Bishara provides an appropriate though somehow more restrained musical score for the film but what he doesn’t do is give it the signature, scare the hell out of everyone, extended dissonance on the revelation of the film’s title at both the start and end of the movie as the previous installments did. This was always part of the fun and I don’t know why the decision was made to not do that this time when it’s become an established part of scoring these films.

Similarly, in terms of continuity... why is this not considered Insidious Chapter Four? While Insidious - The Last Key is an okay title and makes some reference to some truly, nicely surreal uses of keys in this film... it feels almost like the people behind the scenes are bailing out of the timeline they set up in the previous three somehow. Even though it’s certainly evident that this film finds a perfect fit in its place within the series. I don’t understand why that decision was made.

Still, those are my only real complaints and although, as I said, I didn’t quite think this one as strong as the previous two, Insidious - The Last Key is still a great ride for fans of the horror genre and, if you like the Insidious films anyway, surely not one to be missed. Plus, like I said earlier, this film has a main protagonist who is a 75 year old woman... go support this stuff so we can see more films with this option on the table. Send Hollywood that message by plonking down your pennies on stuff like this... I’m glad I did.

Insidious Chapter 3

Insidious Elf, 
One of the Family

Insidious Chapter 3
2015  Canada/USA
Directed by Leigh Whannell
UK cinema release print.

My personal reactions to the Insidious films have been documented on this blog as each movie has been released. Regular readers may remember that I really didn’t think a whole lot of the first Insidious movie (reviewed here), dismissing it as mostly being a remake of the old Little Girl Lost episode of the original series of The Twilight Zone, filtered by way of Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s big budget reworking of elements of that story, Poltergeist, in 1982. Well put together but nothing we hadn’t seen done a fair few times before and with a disappointing last quarter of an hour or so which plunged it into teen slasher horror of the worst kind. Why I bothered seeing the sequel to this one is purely because I was curious as to how the ending of that movie could be used as a way in to the second. When I saw Insidious 2 (reviewed here) I found it to be a lot more interesting because of where the story had been left and a much stronger entry in the series.

Also, and I’m trying not to be spoilery for either that movie or this third part here, one of the more interesting characters in that second film was in a place right at the end where a sequel including this character in the circumstances she finds herself in at the end of that film would be most interesting and certainly something you wouldn’t normally see in a modern movie for a main character in a story.

As it happens, I kinda half got my wish but was initially somewhat sceptical when I found out that the third movie is, in fact, a prequel and, also, it wasn’t directed by James Wan, director of the first two films (and also the magnificent modern horror classic The Conjuring - reviewed here). However, having now seen it, I am actually grateful on a couple of counts that we’ve gone back in time a little for this one. Also, seeing that one of the producers is Oren Peli, whose Paranormal Activities franchise also time leaped back for the third movie (reviewed here) and strengthened the future films by doing so, meant that I’m not against the idea. This film might well be used for taking the franchise in a more coordinated direction in the future, I suspect. It’s also being directed by the writer of all three installments, his debut in this function, Leigh Whannel. Whannel also has a recurring role in all three films... but I’ll get to that soon enough.

So what we have here is a completely different set of characters and it involves a young girl, Quinn Brenner played by actress Stefanie Scott, who is trying to help hold everyone together in a small family unit comprising of her brother (played by Tate Berney) and her father Sean, played by Dermot Mulroney, after the death of her mother. She is quite distressed by her mother’s death (as anyone would be) and she still thinks she feels her presence trying to make contact. Desperately needing to talk to her departed parent, she seeks out the psychic investigator/medium from the first two films, Elise Rainier played by veteran actress (of 180 movies at time of writing) Lin Shaye. Now, the film is set only two years before the events in the first movie but, here, Elise has given up offering her unique services to people because of a dark phantom who tries to kill her every time she does. This is not what you would expect from the character only a short number of years before we initially met her in the first chapter and, as she slowly gets involved with trying to stop the demon who is terrorising young Quinn in a series of the usual, exploitative scare tactics inflicted on audiences in these kinds of spectacles, we are slowly revealed to the elements of her back story that initially got her there in the first place.

And this is why the film gets interesting and, frankly, does what all good genre cinema does... influencing mainstream thinking by going through the back door, hopefully. In this film, Elise is pretty much the main protagonist or, at the very least, as much of a main protagonist as Quinn Brenner, getting at least equal, probably more actually, screen time. It’s a strong, female role in a genre which has always promoted strong female roles, even as far back as some of the early 'Hammer Horrors' and it goes so much further beyond just the general whittling away of characters until you’re left with the one, final girl who becomes the strong survivor by default (a pattern even followed by Sigourney Weaver’s much celebrated character in the first Alien movie, of course). Now, on it’s own as a strong element of "gender in your genre", that’s all well and good and is probably a cause for congratulation... but that’s not the sole reason why I think this film is just a little more ready to indulge in some, almost subversive, shenanigans and why I hope the effect of this film might be able to have some slow but sure widespread influence, not just on the horror genre in general but in, hopefully, mainstream cinematic culture.

The thing is... I hope Lin Shaye doesn’t mind me saying that she’s no spring chicken. She’s 72 years old in fact. The role she is playing and how it develops and builds over the course of this film is kind of, by the end game, a psychic female action hero. When terrified by a demon in an other wordly zone (The Further), for instance, she breaks it’s grip with a head butt to the face and a bring it on kind of attitude which causes it to back down. She then proceeds to find her inner strength with a display of psychic carnage in this other plane and, mostly, wreaks havoc on her ghostly enemies like a modern, female Dr. Strange. How many other movies out there at the moment, or in a very long time for that matter, have 72 year old lady action hero’s kicking the villain’s butts? This is terrific stuff and unheard of for mainstream cinema these days... so I’m hoping that this will gradually be an influence on other horror movies, little by little, until it slips into main blockbuster cinematic syntax by a process of casual familiarity.

It’s okay to have very old, female heroes, folks... and guess what the average age of the target audience that a horror movie like the ones in the Insidious franchise are being aimed at is? Well, I don’t know but I’m pretty sure these things are being made for late teens/early twenties audiences primarily to be able to get the money back... so there’s that. Low budget horror movies usually turn a profit and this is the kind of genre where you can sneakily make this kind of change first... so something to think about there and I’m pleased with the writer for doing this.

Of course, another thing the horror genre does, by its very nature and due to an easy recognition of the visual language of the horror film, is to try and concentrate your attention away from where the scare is coming but, in a lot of cases and including this film, that also means turning the camera to places where the action is not happening and concentrating on different areas of the shot to give your mind a build up to the scare. Now, when you think about it, allowing other things in a frame to dominate over the actual action that’s going on in the rest of the shot is more of a European way of shooting a movie than something that would normally be accepted in a mainstream American piece. It’s a specific way of doing things and it’s no better or worse than any other kind of strategic visual aesthetic but I find it intriguing where the one kind of US mainstream cinema where that is encouraged is in the horror genre. I’m not saying it’s in any way a deliberate nod to a less native approach to shooting movies (and it wouldn’t have been seen to be either, up until around the late 1970s in US movie production)... it’s more just a symptom of the approach to being creative with some overly familiar genre rules at this point in the game... but it’s certainly something else which separates what you can get happening in a low budget horror movie at this time which wouldn’t be acceptable in a lot of other current commercial product.

The other nice thing about this film is the return, in the last third of the movie, of Tucker and Specs, played by Angus Simpson and the writer/director of this movie, Leigh Whannell - the two nerdy psychic investigators with their blog, 'Spectral Sightings'. It’s here we see them meet Elise for the first time and, due to events in this film, forge an alliance that will see them through to the team they have become in the first two movies and, hopefully, the quite unique team they will be in any subsequent chapters. There are some nice touches in here and, although I found some of the transition jumps in this movie a bit out of kilter with what I would have expected (and I don’t think that this was necessarily done on purpose but possibly from a lack of shots designed to be edited into a workable transition?), I think Whannell does a competent job as a director. It's maybe not quite up to the same standard as the second movie, to be sure, but it’s certainly a whole lot better than the first installment and, coupled with another winning score for the series by Joseph Bishara, with more melody being allowed to bleed into the atonality in this set of compositions than usual, then you have a pretty solid time at your local cinema if supernatural chills are your kinda thing. Still happy to go and see what they do with a fourth one on the strength of this and, frankly, the inclusion of a 72 year old lady action hero is something to be celebrated, no matter what genre it’s happening in. So maybe check this one out if horror movies are your kind of thing and, due to the chronological setting of this one, you don’t even really need to have seen the first two movies to give this one a shot. Enjoy.

Insidious: Chapter 2

Tempus Forget

Insidious: Chapter 2
2013 USA
Directed by James Wan
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers for both Insidious movies 
waiting to pounce from another dimension as you read.

It’s funny. I seem to remember being a lot more disappointed with the first of the Insidious movies than my review here seems to show. Maybe I was being a little kinder to it than I would be nowadays. I remember being really annoyed with the last half hour when the weird “other dimension” creature showed up, turning it into a boring teen nightmare monster flick. However, I also remember being impressed enough with the execution of the on-screen scares which built up to this last half hour to the point where I guess I cut it some slack, maybe. Although, you could see the end of the movie coming a mile off.

Insidious: Chapter 2 is not, as many reviewers would have you believe, a sub-standard carbon copy of the original movie but is actually a valid sequel to the first film which, yes, truly tries to hit the same points that its fan base loved in the first one, but which does so quite validly because of the history of the events which were visited upon this same family in the first movie. I have to say that there was enough going on in the new one to keep me interested and that, although there are some pretty annoying weaknesses in this one, overall I felt a little more entertained than the first time around.

Okay, so this one starts of in a somewhat scary pre-credits sequence where we re-meet the father of the family, Josh, but as a little boy. He’s obviously having some problems with the spirit world and we also meet a younger version of the psychic, Elise, who was killed at the end of the last movie. This opening sets the story up to get back to the family in the present, one day later after the events in the first movie.

Well, Josh is still possessed, as we knew from the end of the last movie, by something which came back in his place and so most of the first half of the running time is setting up the same kinds of scares but with the audience knowing about what’s going on a lot quicker than any of the regular characters realise. The problem here is, because there’s a lot of story to cover in this one, the scares are a lot quicker to come than they were in the first movie and so there’s no real pacing involved. Scares of this kind usually need to exist in an atmosphere of lurking dread and slow build and here... it’s just not scary because the timing seems wrong and rushed. It’s like coming in straight into the third act of a horror movie without bothering to set the scene.

Another big problem with things going on here is... all anyone needs to do is take a photograph of pseudo-Josh in our dimension and all would be revealed. Just as they’d twigged in the last film. Seems like all the characters in this movie decided to have collective amnesia on that front. Bit of a shame really.

However, this movie makes up for what it lacks in scares with some interesting plot spins leading off from the first movie and, by the time you’ve got a couple of the film’s main hero characters wandering around in the afterlife guided by Elise (Lin Shaye reprising her role from the first movie) then things start to get interesting. It seems that in the realm beyond our senses, the people who dwell in this strange, halfway dimension, are able to travel in time and this kind of temporal relocation means we get to discover the other viewpoint of some of the things which went on in the first movie plus other perspectives of things which went on in the pre-credits of this movie. It’s all a bit like Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning appearing to themselves at the start of an old Doctor Who episode, to be honest, but I do like these kind of “tempus fugit” style shenanigans, truth be told, so I don’t see any fault here. The film also gives us a nice new villain and a nice new ally character, included in an arsenal of interesting characters, so that’s all good. It’s also got rid of that creepy surreal neon guy from the last bit of the first movie so... yeah, good call.

Ultimately, it’s not that effective as a scary movie and I can understand why some people are disappointed with it. I think though, it does have a lot of nice things to say about the events of the first movie and gives it a more grounded place to live in. It’s still quite surreal in places, which is a good thing, but it’s not as in your face and unsubtle at that kind of stuff as the first one and so, consequently, this film is more effective in that sense, at least.

It’s also good that even when characters are dead, they can still go running around and helping people out and the fact that, even at the end of the movie, Elise is still working with her two assistants from the first movie (although they themselves don’t even know she’s there) gives the Insidious universe a more interesting and durable texture to it than some movies in this genre have going for them. And the ending of this actually sets it up for a third installment where you just know someone has been left behind (and consequently someone bad has come back in a form we don’t know yet) and I hope a third movie gets the green light so I can see what Elise is seeing at the end of this one.

All in all, the Insidious movies put together are not half the film that the same director’s The Conjuring (reviewed here) is. If you want to see a truly creepy horror movie, go catch that one. But I can see how Insidious: Chapter 2 might win a certain following and I can certainly imagine many people would use this as a comfort film, much like they would a zombie film. It’s not the best horror movie out there, by a long shot, but it’s certainly got its own thing going for it and the performances are all great, including the always watchable Patrick Wilson as, not one, but two versions of Josh. If you liked the first movie then I think this one is worth taking a look at sometime.