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When I was a kid, I loved a good ghost story. The more it gave me chills—the later it kept me awake at night—the more I loved it.
Around the campfire, ghost stories may be plentiful—but, in movies, they’re pretty hard to come by. More often, horror movies are about demented psychopaths who stab and slice and torture for hours on end. So a creepy ghost story like Insidious is a welcome surprise.
When Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) moved their three kids into a big new house, they thought that they were making a fresh start—that their lives would change for the better. But shortly after they move in, their son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) has an accident while exploring the attic. By the next morning, he’s slipped into a strange kind of coma.
While the Lamberts try to care for their son, though, strange things start to happen around the house. They hear voices in the baby’s monitor. They’re visited by terrifying ghostly intruders. And their other son claims that Dalton has been walking around at night.
Convinced that the house is haunted, the Lamberts move once again—but the hauntings continue. It isn’t until Josh’s mom (Barbara Hershey) calls in an old friend that they discover that the problem isn’t the house—it’s their son.
Written by Leigh Whannell and directed by James Wan (both of Saw fame), Insidious is carnival funhouse creepy—with plenty of old-fashioned cheap scares to keep you perched on the edge of your seat, peering at the screen through the gap between your fingers. Instead of bloody and gruesome, though, it’s quietly and deliberately eerie, with a simple (albeit somewhat predictable) story that often builds up to just a tauntingly terrifying glimpse of the horrors.
The cast, too, makes the film stand out from the usual schlocky horror adventures. Barbara Hershey’s small role alone seems to give the movie a little bit of cred—and Byrne easily surpasses the typical scream queen with a believably dramatic performance.
Still, Insidious isn’t without its flaws. The washed-out footage is often distracting (I kept wondering whether there was something wrong with the theater’s projector). And the comically geeky team of Specs and Tucker (writer Whannell and Angus Sampson), who use contraptions of their own making to examine the house, feel out of place (though they do give the film a slight Poltergeist feel). But if you love a good ghost story as much as I do, you’ll be able to overlook the film’s flaws and enjoy its old-fashioned creepiness.
Just like those ghost stories that you used to tell around the campfire, Insidious is good, creepy fun. And it’s even more fun if you can enjoy it with a theater full of anxious audience members—especially if there happens to be a screamer or two nearby. So give your old summer camp bunkmate a call and make plans to meet up for a midnight screening of this enjoyably eerie supernatural thriller.
