George Bate
In the 16 years since its theatrical release, the original Insidious has aged rather poorly. James Wan’s 2010 film certainly has some memorable horror movie visuals and employs a number of intricately engineered old-school scares, but its overreliance on jump scares, made all the more annoying by coupling them with deafening, screeching sounds, renders Insidious a movie of a bygone age of horror cinema.
The legacy of the original Insidious isn’t helped by a string of poor sequels and prequels. While a few bright spots emerged at times, the franchise largely leaped from one uninspired installment to the next and was so routine that even repeated returns of Lin Shaye’s Elsie Rainier couldn’t save it from being overshadowed by the might of other, better studio-backed horror franchises.
Breaking the trend of subpar series entries and likely surprising even the most die-hard of Insidious fanatics, Insidious: Out of the Further brings the mediocre franchise out of The Further and is the best Insidious movie of all time: a clever, compelling, polished, and well-constructed late-summer surprise.
Written and directed by Jacob Chase (Come Play), Insidious: Out of the Further follows Gemma (Amelia Eve), a young mother raising her daughter in her childhood home. Determined to give her daughter a peaceful childhood, unlike the one she had under her mother, Gemma starts to experience strange dreams and visions that bring her The Further, a purgatorial realm of lost souls. As Gemma tries to make sense of what’s going on, she soon realizes that she is the subject of a calculated plot to bring the dead from The Further into the real world.
Conceptually, Chase’s film intrigues with its inversion of the core structure of an Insidious movie. Instead of characters desperately trying to escape The Further, the new protagonist Gemma possesses the power to pull entities out of The Further and into the real world. Whereas previous movies focused on astral projection and the living’s presence in a spectral purgatory, the new film creatively expands upon franchise lore by breaking the barrier and having demons encroach upon humanity’s home turf.
Both through its inverted structure and intelligent decision to finally pivot away from the Lambert family, Insidious: Out of the Further plays more like a reboot than a traditional sequel. Chase ensures that his film remains approachable to audiences who have never seen an Insidious movie, while sprinkling in a fair few nods and lore expansion to delight long-standing fans of the franchise. One could go as far to say that the film would be relatively unrecognizable as Insidious film if the studio opted to strip it of its Insidious name and rebrand it as an original horror film, something that will almost certainly please viewers who have grown tired of the franchise’s diminishing returns.
At the heart of the film is Gemma, a new character introduced to the audience as a child during a prologue taking place in 1999. As the cold-open depicts, a young Gemma often took care of herself, cooking meals and putting herself to bed for instance, as her mother was often distant and unconscious, possibly due to substance use. In adulthood, Gemma has a daughter of her own who she wishes to provide the kind of peaceful, wholesome childhood she was deprived of.
The anxiety of a parent determined not to be the kind of parent their mother was brings unexpected emotional depth to Insidious: Out of the Further. Chase’s film is not just a series of jump scares cobbled together, but, rather, a thoughtful depiction of intergenerational trauma and the desire to give our children better lives than the ones given to us. As much as Gemma struggles to make sense of the supernatural occurrences troubling her, she is also made to reckon with a far more intimate struggle, one that gives the film’s protagonist more dimensionality than the average horror movie lead.
In addition to its effective character work, Insidious: Out of the Further surprises with both the comprehensibility and intrigue of its central narrative. Many supernatural horror movies quickly devolve into unintelligible narrative territory and appear uninterested in little else other than eliciting jolts from moviegoers. Chase’s film, however, couples its scares with a genuinely interesting story. The film bolsters an unsettling, ominous, and visually striking antagonist in the form of Cyrus (Sam Spruell), whose motives are far more intricate than merely scaring and killing people and which tie into the aforementioned inversion of the traditional structure of an Insidious film. Even if one does not find the scares Chase crafts to be particularly compelling, there is a fairly captivating story propelling Out of the Further forward, especially when compared to other, similar studio horror movies.
Cyrus isn’t the only memorable addition to the Insidious franchise this time around. The inclusion of a trio of creepy elderly characters known as Acolytes make for unnerving secondary antagonists, compelling in both their fascinating backstories and disturbing appearances.
In large part due to the design of and approach to the Acolytes, Insidious: Out of the Further largely succeeds in building tension and provoking fright. Chase engineers a number of well-crafted and conceptually novel scares that employ clever shot compositions and camera movements and excel in subverting what the audience might expect the scare will entail. A scene involving a homemade fort and another involving a particularly harrowing trip to the dentist stand out as the film’s most disconcerting and expertly executed set-pieces, carefully toying with audiences’ expectations and cultivating palpable dread before the inevitable jump scare arrives. Chase’s film may not terrify in the manner a select few other horror movies do, but there is an admirable quality and technicality of filmmaking underlying the fright sequences.
Insidious: Out of the Further is the exceedingly rare sixth installment of a horror franchise that ranks as the best of the bunch. A clever inversion of the franchise’s structure, a compelling protagonist whose story speaks to issues relevant beyond the scope of a movie, a handful of novel, well-crafted scares, and a memorable collective of antagonists driving forward the rare studio supernatural horror movie that has a narrative equal to, if not more, fascinating that the frights render Chase’s sophomore effort a welcomed late summer surprise. Those hungry for a horror movie (other than Obsession and Backrooms) amidst a summer dominated by superheroes, suns and sandals spectacles, and animated family movies could certainly do worse.
