Even if story and sense are not their strong suits, they can create an eerie image. Here and elsewhere, you’re reminded why Wan and Whannel have a reputation for conjuring effectively quirky horrors.
Before you can say “Father Merrin”, furniture is crashing about and Elise is pitching to and fro, and Dalton’s parents are looking horrified indeed.Įlise in the mask is a sight to be savored, as the scene insists. “Leave the vessel,” she tells the bad spirits. She dons a contraption that resembles a gas mask to communicate with the boy and any monsters hanging about, monsters who know her, as they call her a “bitch” and other mean names. How long have these pictures been on Dalton’s bedroom wall, anyway?Įlise looks about to speed up the action when she arrives, ready for a séance-y effort. Looking over his shoulder as he peruses these images tacked to the wall, you can’t help but wonder at his surprise. Only after Josh is advised that Dalton is lost in “astral projections”, besieged by spirits from a place Elise calls “the Further”, does he notice his son’s pleas for help in the form of startlingly violent black and red crayon drawings. Their quick survey of the situation with homemade equipment produces a dire prognosis. This haunting sounds a lot like possession, but there’s no exorcist in sight, only this pert lady and her pair of nerdy employees, Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (screenwriter James Whannell). Lorraine’s secret involves her longtime friendship with a psychic, Elise (Lin Shaye), who informs Josh and Renai – as you’ve seen in the trailers for Insidious – that it’s not their houses that are haunted, but rather, their son. This won’t surprise anyone – except, rather vividly, her grown son.
Here we see the motive for Hershey’s casting: she’s not just any reasonably worried grandmother, but a mom with a terrible secret. If Josh is slow and, frankly, rather resistant to grasp the truth, his mom, Lorraine, finally makes him face it. The monsters they’re dealing with are so… insidious that they’ve hitched a ride with the family. Just days later, when they’re unpacking boxes again, it’s obvious to all but the willfully ignorant Josh that they’ve left none of their troubles behind. At last, Renai finds a sign of intrusion she can’t live with while Josh is staying late at school – and so she rages, cries, and insists they leave this terrible place. Foster tells his mom he’s scared of Dalton: “I don’t like it when he walks around at night.” She doesn’t quite hear that right but struggles with her encounters with the supernatural – shadows skittering across the floor or hiding in closets, laughing at her, and wearing old paperboy-style clothes (because olden days costumes are scary). Insidious spends less time watching Josh fume and evade, heading off to teach his class rather than help his wife deal with their infant, their comatose child, or their other son, Foster (Andrew Astor). The camera tracks slowly behind her as she walks through various hallways and investigates odious noises. A prelude to the whole business has informed you that a sinister face-in-the-window is laying claim to little boys’ souls, but Renai and Josh take an interminably long time to sort out what you anticipate. The creepiness in Wan’s film has mostly to do with pace.
Insidious jumps ahead a few months so that Dalton is brought home from the hospital to lay pale and pathetic in his bed. Doctors can’t explain it (“There’s no brain trauma!”), and his parents are horrified, for a minute anyway. The first and most obvious clue comes when young Dalton (Ty Simpkins) checks out a creaky attic and is later found in a coma state. No surprise, the new house is soon revealed to be something like a cross between that place on the Indian burial ground and the other one in Amityville and probably the one plagued by Paranormal Activity, too. And yes, she will be punished for spending time at the piano while the baby is upstairs alone – or, er, not so alone. She’s a songwriter, or more precisely, finally getting back to writing after birthing babies. He has convinced his wife to move to a new house in search of a new start following some unidentified trouble. In Insidious, that son is Josh (Patrick Wilson), a less-than-happy schoolteacher married to Renai (Rose Byrne) and father to three young children. This time she’s haranguing her beset son to recover repressed memories. But this time, she’s not haranguing her beset daughter to eat pink birthday cake. Barbara Hershey plays the scary mom (again) in James Wan‘s Insidious.
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