Spirits Unlocked: INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER

James Wan’s Insidious is one of the great jump scare horror movies. It’s a haunting that leaps out and rattles you with sudden appearances and over-cranked sound design. Some people run down the very idea of a good jolt in a horror picture, calling it cheap and easy way to spike an audience’s attention. But, like all cinema techniques, it’s all in how you deploy it. Compare, for instance, how scary that movie is with how boring its sequels are. It takes a shivery execution and drains it of novelty and fright. It doesn’t help that the premise—a shadowy netherworld called “the further” where demons and spirits congregate hoping to be let into our world, and the living people who can travel there and back again—usually ends up in pretty dull climactic sequences. A sympathetic character wanders what’s essentially a black box theater with a fog machine pumping away off screen. They repeatedly scream the name of the person they’re saving while waving an old-timey lantern. Sometimes ghouls shamble forward and claw at them. It’s all a bit silly, and a bit empty. And this is how four whole sequels have attempted to resolve some standard-issue hauntings! At least the new one, Insidious: Out of the Further, finally comes up with something neat to do with the idea again. 

Writer-director Jacob Chase, new to the series, makes the early going merely a pretty good version of what these movies have done before. A single mom (Amelia Eve) is haunted by these spooky visions and hopes to stop them, and protect her daughter (Island Austin), before she goes totally off the deep end. She’s haunted not just by the spectral beings, but by the memories of her mother (Laura Hall) and her apparent psychotic break twenty years earlier. A psychic tells our lead she has a special gift that’s drawing unwanted ghostly attention. She can bring objects and spirits between these planes of existence and an evil ghost hopes to use her as a conduit to raise his dead acolytes. That’s good stuff! And gives a neat opening for reliable series regular Lin Shaye to reemerge as a spirited guide. (It’s always fun to see a woman above a certain age holding down a horror franchise.) The variables in play give the climax some earthier stakes and the emotional hook of mothers and daughters reconciling across generations and between life and death is nicely done. That our lead’s career in dentistry leads to some skin-crawling tooth business is just an added bonus on the tensions at play. It all adds up to a sixth Insidious that’s easily the best of the series since the original—small praise, perhaps, but a nice surprise, too.