Insidious is Insidious

(Click image for trailer)

Insidious (2011), by James Wan                7.5/10

     No matter where I go, what I do, what I read, write or watch, I will always have to admit that the horror genre is probably my biggest influence and the factor that it triggered my interest in literary and visual narrative. As a little kid I often stumbled accidentally upon many movies that freaked me out. It first started with the Wicked Witch of the West sabotaging the Munchkins’ gleeful parade in a ball of red smoke and her horrifying screeches as she melted away. Don’t get me wrong, I loved that movie as a child, I still do, but nevertheless it still gave me nightmares. Often I found myself restless at night imagining an evil green witch with warts all over her face flying on a crooked broom circling my room and reaching to grab me with her long bony fingers, showing me her black teeth as she cackled. But this did not stop me from watching The Wizard of OZ repeatedly. I enjoyed feeling that way because I found amazing the amount of power that a piece of fiction could have on me, and not only fiction, art in general. I was always a creative and imaginative kid, and being scared of the Wicked Witch of  the West is just one example of how I came to  understand the power of my imagination and all that I could do with it. That’s why I started compulsively watching many other fantasy movies as a child, often with a dark overtone over it, like Labyrinth, or Legend.

(Tim Curry as the Dark Lord in the 1985 PG rated film Legend by Ridley Scott. Yes, this is a family fantasy film about saving the nearly extinct unicorns.)

     Later in my life I stumbled upon a very famous, very haunting movie: The Shining. It was then when I was introduced to the world of horror, and of course, Stephen King. And although I don’t consider Stephen King the greatest writer in the world, my loyalty is and always will  be towards him because watching his movies and reading his books since when I was twelve completely mapped my future and my present. I immediately wanted to be a writer and share my imagination, my glories and my horrors with the world.

     That being said, I think everyone agrees that horror, like many other genres and things,  has become conventional and mundane and a very hard trick to pull of nowadays. Still, I am always seeking that thrill that shook me off my knees that the old dead lady in the bathroom gave me while reading (and watching) The Shining, that thrill that that terrible, wickedly ugly, evil witch gave me when she tried to grab me from my bed. The same insidious thrill I feel and enjoy when I am at the most climactic point of a long fast rollercoaster. Horror, though, is not really a fictional attempt to mimic the true horror of our reality, not even the ones that say intend that. Horror is a genre that’s supposed to fool our imaginations into believing, at least for a moment, that it is possible, and most importantly, it has to force us  to ask the million dollar question, “What if this was possible? What if I was part of this story?”. It is the same science of any superstition; we know it’s not true, yet we fear it anyway.  This is what a successful horror story/film does. In the end, horror as a genre will always lie in our imagination, and our specific enjoyment of it.  This is the reason why it is so hard to make a successful horror fictional work, because in many ways, horror has lost the innovative factor that makes something memorable.

(Old dead child-eating lady from the famous bathtub scene of the 1996 mini TV series version of Stephen King’s The Shining.)

     There are many classic, unforgettable horror films in the past, many of them large franchises that still remain big in popular culture today. For example, Freddy Kruger will always haunt our dreams, and Jason Vorhees will always stalk us at night after we’ve been naughty[ ;) ], Michael Myers will keep stabbing babysitters in lonely houses and the devil will keep possessing children into projectile vomiting and self-raping. This does not mean that these movies are good in their totality, though, but they’re memorable, and though many times stupid and (very) unrealistic, they’re still haunting and imaginative. This, of course, lies in the eye of the beholder, but no one can deny a classic. My hate towards Jane Austen and most Victorian literature, for example, is perpetual, yet nevertheless, I have to acknowledge and admire the factors of that literature and their effect it had in history. On that note, making a successful movie these days is very hard, mostly because people feel like they’ve seen everything before, and let’s face it, being original these days is very hard and in effect great horror epics from the last decade can be picked up with tweezers to separate from the bunch of other lame horror films.

     Director James Wan (Saw, Dead Silence), though, was a lucky man. Not only was he the director of one of the cheapest, smartest and possibly greatest horror film from the last decade (Saw), he managed to pull of a franchise out of it. Smart, indeed. This is not to say that most of those sequels were not as good as the original film, some would argue they were  not good at all. Still, a classic’s a classic. Immediately after Saw’s success Jigsaw became the voice of our conscience, the constant narrator of the sins against ourselves. The big ‘fail’ in the rest of the franchise was that after Wan and the rest of the collaborating filmmakers who continued with the franchise managed to pull of a smart psychological horror film, they wrongfully fell into the assumption that horror also needs the presence of excessive gore or visual shock. Gore and visual shock can be  great tools for horror, but it is not a necessity, it completely depends on the concept of the film and the style and intention of the filmmaker, and there must certainly always be a balance with stuff like this. This, in effect, caused that people who like  gore in their movies not appreciate well enough the plot, so that in every sequel filmmakers were indirectly pushed into making the plot more ruthlessly obvious, and the people who might actually appreciate the psychological aspect of the plot to find a misbalance between gimmicky  gore and smart plot. This also shows in other of Wan’s projects like Dead Silence, and even in his movie Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon and John Goodman. Still, I personally give Wan credit for a successful, though sometimes gimmicky, franchise. A lot more successful than other failed franchises from the last decade like The Ring or The Grudge or any other creepy-Japanese-psycho-ghost-child-with-black-long-hair-that-croaks-a-lot franchise from the last decade.

     Insidious (finally to the main point!) was definitely a surprise for me for several reasons. This film for me is proof that James Wan and the rest of his collaborating producers learned from their small mistakes with their previous franchise. Sort of. Still, I saw more roots of their first film success (the original Saw) than from the rest of the franchise. My next surprise was that the movie was in collaboration with the producers of Paranormal Activity, a concept very different that anything that Wan had ever done before. And to be honest, when I first saw the trailer, I did not think that was a good thing. Fortunately, I was wrong. This might be my inner horror-fan-boy talking, but the retro-horror influences injected into this movie tickled the fan boy out of that little kid hiding under the covers from the evil green witch.

     Insidious has everything I love from old-school horror films from the seventies and eighties. At first it starts off as common haunted house story, then it turns into dramatic irresolvable mystery, then it turns into a ghost story, then it turns into a possessed kid horror film and ultimately a fantasy horror film that can be taken out of any Stephen King novel, with a desperate high tension conclusion that will rape your imagination vigorously. I have to admit, I really liked this movie.

     When the poster says that “Insidious is insidious,” let me tell you, it is not lying. I looked up the definition of the word ‘insidious’ and it goes like this:

insidious: Producing serious harm in a stealthy, often gradual, manner; Intending to entrap; Treacherous.

That very definition can be used to describe the way the screenplay was written. It constantly fools you into a different kind of story. It obviously also describes the way the supernatural works within the film. By the end of the movie, while inconclusive, it still leaves no plot holes unexplained. The story develops in the perfect pace, the very believable characters go through a perfect character development that will have you sympathizing with them from the very first second they appear. Not only did James Wan decided to take out the exaggerated gore and leave the movie rated PG-13, he also proceeded to cast great actors like Patrick Wilson(Phantom of the Opera, Watchmen), Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later), and Barbara Hershey (Black Swan, 11:14).  The style of the movie echo great epic horror classics like Poltergeist, The Exorcist, and in many ways even Nightmare on Elm St. The haunting dissonant music will keep you on your toes, looking for possible ghosts or poltergeist signs in every frame. The eerie way the camera moves throughout the lives of this family is as creepy as it is beautiful, almost as if watching the haunting beauty of a moving painting. 

             

(Old-school horror influences can be noticed even the movie’s poster art. Left: Insidious [2011], Right: Suspiria [1977])

    Despite my praises for Insidious, I do also have to think objectively about it. The only big flaw I saw in this film, as well as many other critics and reviewers have, was that when the time came to actually see the thing that makes the story so horrible, it doesn’t seem as horrible as we might have imagined. Another lesson for Wan to learn: sometimes (and this is just sometimes) it is better to trust your audience’s imagination instead of giving them what they want. The problem I have with this is that the way the movie ends, it really seems like Wan actually understands this concept really well. Like I said before, the ending is absolutely inconclusive, yet that is what I found so excellent about it, because that is what’s actually terrifying, the not knowing, the incertitude and the imagining the terrible possibilities. I only hope that he’s not intending another franchise because 1)it will be annoying for everyone starting with myself, 2) it will flop, and 3) it will once again prove the falseness of Hollywood ($$$$$$).  Anyways, the point is that we can’t see ghosts in reality, not the way we see them in movies at least, depends on your beliefs, and for movies to be scary they should seem at least a little bit real, even in an unrealistic genre like fantasy or horror. Although we want to see some ghosts in our ghost movies, don’t show us too many ghosts. That scene where Samara comes out of the TV, that was enough for the whole movie, wasn’t it? By the last act of Insidious, the story got too gimmicky, not enough to ruin the movie for me, fortunately, but unfortunately enough to ruin the movie for many others, especially movie critics and over-analytical, skeptical film watchers. What I mean by gimmicky is the fact that not only there is a definite overload of ghosts, but they seem quirky, often not even scary, and although that is not the case for all of the ghosts, it is true for most of them. However,  it still does have many bone-chilling images which makes it very fun to watch.

     Nevertheless, I think Insidious is an excellent  improvement on Wan’s part, and it stands out to me from all the rest of horror movies in the past months. In the end, Insidious is an example of good original filmmaking with echoing influences of horror cult-classics of the past. Still, Insidious will probably not haunt your dreams nor be remembered for very long, but it will definitely give you those rollercoaster thrills we look for in scary movies while it lasts, and it definitely makes you appreciate its filmmaking. It is unsettling all the way through, sometimes in scary ways, sometimes in bizarre ways, but nonetheless unsettling. It is a very well acted, filmed, edited and very well written movie, and I would  definitely recommend it to all fans of good cult-horror and good storytelling. I rate it 7.5/10, very good.

     Until next time, This is Freddy Lizardz with Words on Film. Peace.

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