Looking Back at INSIDIOUS: Still Genuinely Fresh

We were once at a hotel with my wife, where until late at night a kid ran around in the room above us, stomping unbearably loudly. My wife, unable to calmly scroll through Facebook, complained about the noisy child upstairs. Then I joked: Listen, but we live on the top floor…. We both knew we were actually on the second floor, with six more above us, but my weak joke genuinely froze us both for a moment… And you know what? That exact feeling of being frozen accompanied me almost continuously during the screening of Insidious which I would like to recommend with this review to all lovers of horror and ghost stories.

There used to be possession-and-haunting films so good and so blood-chilling that they immediately went down in the history of the seventh art. It is enough to mention such genre classics as The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Changeling, or The Shining. Then came many years of silence, until at the end of the twentieth century we experienced an explosion of horror cinema, in the form of the astonishingly surprising The Sixth Sense and the somewhat less surprising but still truly scary The Others.

Later came the expansion of Asian terror, with all sorts of grotesques and monsters emerging from televisions and wells, running along walls or next to speeding cars. And still later, Spanish horror took over, giving the world such gems as Pan’s Labyrinth, REC, The Orphanage or El Hierro. And the Americans got angry and decided to remind viewers that they still know how not only to scare properly but also to build an excellent atmosphere that lingers in memory.

When I saw the slogan, intended as promotional but in reality discouraging me from watching Insidious, reading a film from the creators of Paranormal Activity and Saw, I did not expect anything good. I consider Paranormal Activity to be an overrated, boring, and simply not scary film, and the creators of Saw could very well have been producers of the next, increasingly miserable installments of the series. However, when I realized that the director was James Wan himself, I decided to give Insidious a chance. I am currently after a second screening, which confirmed my conviction that we are dealing with a horror film that cannot be skipped.

I did not think I would ever see a film that, while borrowing from The Shining, not only does not desecrate it or become its unintended parody, but turns out to be a quite successful continuation of Kubrick’s work. I will point out immediately, however, that Insidious does not in any way match the adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. It is not in the same league; it is several levels below, but… Insidious very skillfully uses formal techniques from the famous 1980 horror. Above all, there are many longer shots focused on detail and loud sounds, attacking the viewer unexpectedly and with high intensity.

It teems with all kinds of heart-pounding jolts and hits on various instruments. Stairs creak, clocks tick loudly, alarms wail insanely, voices whisper, and the flash of light blinks with the unsettling Puff!, puff!, puff!. Additionally, there is a cleverly used idyllic song in one of the most interestingly staged scenes. One can confidently say that Insidious is a film primarily based on its sound layer, which is its brightest and most characteristic element. The visual execution is also of a high standard. Most shots were created using a steadicam, which makes the on-screen events more realistic and makes us feel closer to the characters. The editing, makeup, and all the actors also deserve praise.

James Wan, the creator of the first Saw film, with its unforgettable ending, this time uses from beginning to end the standard horror cinema devices: suddenly appearing figures, doors opening in the middle of the night, mysterious shadows, strange sounds, and so on. And he builds from them not so much a new quality, because we have seen all this in one form or another before, but a coherent and highly watchable whole. It is surprising, but this, overall formulaic and lacking plot twists and major surprises, film ultimately gives the impression of something genuinely fresh.

Even the atmospheric opening sequence builds a mood of horror and mystery. And during the screening, at the sight of an unexpected phenomenon accompanied by sounds straight from hell, we often jump in our cinema seats. Strange figures emerging from darkness, shotgun sounds in the distance, shots with ghosts in the background, hauntings, possessions — these elements, though well-known and often present in ghost stories, are presented in Insidious in such a way that they still work and effectively give chills.

You know that feeling when you go down to the basement, turn on the light, take a jar of jam, and then, after turning off the light, have to go back up the stairs? I will not believe that you are not afraid, that something will chase you, that something in the darkness is following you, that something will catch you, and that you do not hurry back upstairs to close the door behind you and get into a lit room. Insidious is saturated with the atmosphere of exactly that kind of return from a dark basement…