In addition to the chilling staging and the solid cast of all the main roles (including Barbara Hershey as the grandmother), the film also managed to win people over with its black humor. The success ensured that a second part followed in 2013, which continued the events of the couple and their three children, and that Insidious finally became a lucrative franchise: the prequel Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) and its continuation Insidious: The Last Key (2018) was still convincing at the box office, but in terms of content it hardly produced anything new.
Insidious: The Red Door returns to the core family from the beginning. Nine years have passed since father Josh (Patrick Wilson) and older son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) were put under hypnosis to forget the traumatic experiences in the Forever Realm. Josh and Renai (Rose Byrne) are now separated. When Dalton begins his studies at art university, a mental exercise by his professor Armagan (Hiam Abbass) causes him to suddenly remember things that have been repressed. And the eerie visions are returning to Josh, too.
Patrick Wilson not only has a central role in front of the camera this time; he also directed Insidious: The Red Door. With his directorial debut, he certainly does not present himself as an idiosyncratic auteur with a very individual style. He does, however, demonstrate a sure skill for goose bumps moments that play quite skillfully with our fear lust while being both suspenseful and funny.
For example, like Wan in the first two Insidious parts or in The Conjuring (2013), Wilson uses the element of silence to build atmosphere and prepare us for the horror. Wilson and his cinematographer Autumn Eakin also exploited the potential of the background with relish. For example, in a sequence in a cemetery, we see Josh sitting in his car and looking at his cell phone while a shadowy figure slowly approaches. Even nastier is a passage in Josh’s house where someone is standing in the garden without Josh noticing at first. Movable cardboard cards that are attached to the window and are repeatedly folded up and down by Josh obscure the view of this person again and again. And of course we suspect bad things. At a later point, among other things, an MRT tube is used very effectively.
The all-new setting of the college campus in the series also makes Insidious: The Red Door a gritty coming-of-age trip between dorm rooms, classrooms, and parties in the vein of Scream 2 (1997) or Dark Legends (1998). Dalton’s extroverted fellow student Chris, who is charismatically embodied by Sinclair Daniel, is responsible for the humor factor, which in the previous parts was mainly created by two nerdy ghostbusters. Meanwhile, Ty Simpkins, who also gave a remarkable performance in The Whale (2022), conveys the urgency with which Dalton searches for answers. Of course, all this doesn’t revolutionize the genre, but it guarantees solid spooky entertainment.
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