Having watched James Wan “evolve” as a filmmaker — the gruesome Saw, the dull Dead Silence, the better-than-it-should-be Death Sentence — I assumed he’d hit a career stride of making moderately entertaining, derivative genre flicks. Unsurprising, in other words. So color me eight shades of surprised when Insidious, a haunted-house movie that absolutely does not try anything new, grabbed me with old-timey spookhouse values like craftsmanship, sound design and frights instead of gore. It’s so old-school it’s new again.
Insidious joins movies such as The Woman in Black and The Orphanage in the current renaissance of horror films that forgo the genre’s modern cynicism and instead stress atmosphere over blood. Working with a tiny budget, Wan recreates the plot of Poltergeist (child kidnapped into ghost realm; family must retrieve him) without the grandiose effects that made Tobe Hooper’s movie a rollicking funhouse and an exception to the rule that big budgets are death for horror films (looking at you, The Haunting remake). Wan keeps the effects to a minimum, plays with silence (always a good bet for tension), and succeeds in generating actual terror. The most nerve-rattling scene has absolutely no scares at all — just a whispering psychic describing a demon only she can see.
Populating his plot with appealing actors such as Patrick Wilson (Watchmen) and Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later), Wan keeps the movie on a slow boil, amping up the dread, sprinkling a supply of boo! moments about, and artfully toying with the audience. For two-thirds of its running time, Insidious is one of the scariest movies in recent memory, only stumbling into the realm of rote when it fully reveals “the further,” the netherworld that is pretty much just a lot of fog.
Yet even here, the budgetary restraints lend the goings-on a charm lacking in bigger-budgeted fright flicks (i.e. the abysmally silly ending to Poltergeist II: The Other Side). It’s a forceful reminder that genre filmmakers often do their best work in the low-budget sphere. Let’s pray Sam Raimi doesn’t forget. —Corey Redekop
I’ll throw another rec for strong old-fashioned spooky: Australia’s Lake Mungo.