Synopsis
Insidious is the terrifying story of a family who shortly after moving discover that dark spirits have possessed their home and that their son has inexplicably fallen into a coma. Trying to escape the haunting and save their son, they move again only to realize that it was not their house that was haunted.
This movie is divided into goofy and strange moments. James Wan’s horror film is a bit of a mess that feels like it’s being made up as it goes along. It has some frightfully good moments in it, but honestly most of it is too cheesy to take serious.
The good moments happen when the family is slowly discovering an evil spirit in the first house, as you see creepy things begin to unfold like harsh shouting through a baby monitor when no one is upstairs. These moments are amplified by a steady/shaky cam shot during almost the entire film, which sets the viewer squarely in the same room as the protagonist as everything is happening. Of course, it doesn’t help that there are creepy antagonist set everywhere, led by a black body/red face demon that appears at the creepiest of times. We should expect no less from the makers of Paranormal Activity and SAW, as they should have learned more than a few things about ‘scary’.
(SPOILER ALERT)
Outside of moments of scariness, the concept of astral projection as the main plot point isn’t all that bad. It’s one of a handful of times where the topic has been brought up in a film, and also one of the few times it has been treated well. Through a series of small flashbacks and cutaways that the audience is clueless about at first, we see a connection to the ‘projection’ that will make you view the film again once the big reveal happens, which is always a good thing.
(SPOILER END)
With all this said, the film is a bit ‘cheese’ heavy when it comes to believability. Once the family learns that the haunting isn’t caused by the house they previously lived in the movie shifts from tension driven to downright goofy. They call in family friend Elise (played by the wonderfully talented Lin Shaye) who can sense ghostly/demon presence. She gives a creepy a opinion of the situation and explains the ‘reveal’ of the film (see spoiler alert for details, if you want). From this point on the film just shifts gears into ridiculous, as Elise attempts to make contact with the couple’s son. She puts on a gas mask and begins communicating during a séance. If you’re not laughing by this point or saying ‘what the f***’ then you’re suspension of disbelief must be suspended for eternity. It was so difficult to accept this was going on and from that point in the film it was hard to reattach back onto the tension filled, scary thrill ride that is promised with all horror films of this type. This part of the film, and everything afterwards (including the surprise ending) felt completely different than the first part of the film. It was like they had written both pieces with two different people for two different films. It was messy and the story wanted to come back together into something cohesive, but it never quite got to that point. It shifted from a healthy track of story driven scary moments to just plain ridiculous at certain points.
The second half of the film simply ruined the first half set up. I don’t want to say anymore in fear of giving too much away.
Let’s talk about the Blu-ray portion of the film. The Blu-ray was pretty good, for the most part. When the movie was setting up the second half there were great moments amplified by a clean quality picture. For example, when we see the demon for the first time you can see so much detail in his face. The blacks, reds and white stand out beautifully. It’s so detailed that you can actually see the veins in the white of its eyes, which just makes the whole thing scarier. The majority of the film looked great with its HD transfer. Towards the end of the film, when there is a majority of black covering the screen and a light guiding the way through the cover, you can see a very defined color band. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but there aren’t many moments in Insidious that have this issue.
As for the audio, this is probably the first film where I needed to turn the audio experience down a bit. While I commend the audio effects put together to amplify the scary moments, the music just was way over the top. The beginning and ending title sequence was annoying; when you see the film you will understand what I’m talking about. It disrupts the film a little bit and makes it seem silly. You get this silliness in 5.1 DTS-HD.
The special features on this release are as follows:
– Horror 101: The Exclusive Seminar
– On Set with Insidious
– Insidious Entitles
The features are decent, especially the Horror 101 feature, which has some good information in it. I like what they did here and it’s good as a whole, but not great.