The Insidious franchise has simply always been there. With five sequels since 2010, the series has always meandered around the lives of the Lambert family or, with the more forgettable middle movies, Elise. The original Insidiousintroduced us to the afterlife, in the form of The Further, as well as quite an interesting world of travellers and mediums. Even though any good horror moments were often few and far between, this set up the groundwork for what could have left behind a legacy of one of the greatest horror franchises of the 2000s.
In the years since, we’ve been shown the aftermath of Elise’s death and a somewhat interesting — if not often quite boring — mystery in Chapter 2, the unnecessary backstory of Elise meeting her sidekicks in Chapter 3’s prequel, Elise’s forgettable child life with The Last Key, and a return to the Lamberts for what proved to show a genuine love for this world, though once again failed to push the boundaries of it, with Patrick Wilson’s directorial debut, The Red Door.
I say all this to say that Insidious: Out of The Further actually feels different. We see more of this world in a way that we’ve never been able to in the eyes of Elise, as well as finally following a family who is completely disconnected from the original characters, and it pays off more than I ever thought it would.
Unfortunately, I found the new direction with a new family so interesting that it made me ponder on what could have been with this franchise. Over the last 15 years, we could have seen an anthology of families throughout this world who are haunted by some sort of entity and come to seek Elise’s expertise. While they did try this in some sense with Chapter 3, the main problem there was the perspective. We traversed that world with Elise, rather than her simply inhabiting part of the story — like we see in Out of The Further.
I’ll start with the opening scene, because I believe it may be my favourite scene in any of the six movies. We follow Gemma, our main character, as a child with a mother who seems to have become insane. From Gemma’s perspective, we see her mother become absent-minded, psychotic, threatening, and finally suicidal and somewhat nihilistic. As an audience, we know we’re not seeing the full picture, yet have no idea what the rest entails, growing our intrigue into this story so much from when we walked in.
This scene is suspenseful and tense all throughout, while planting seeds that will prove to be important later. This never uses jump scares — something this franchise seems very fond of — and hardly even tries to scare you at all. Simply not knowing is what scares you. From your experience with this franchise, you can take an educated guess as to what’s happening, Ingrid is likely possessed by an entity — just like Josh Lambert in the first and second movies — but you can’t know that for sure and that is what’s scary. We’ve always gone through this world with Elise holding our hands, telling us exactly what’s happening. When she isn’t there, though, we’re now alone with no idea what’s going on and are desperately looking for answers that aren’t coming.
This scene feels very similar, in essence alone, to one of my favourite moments from the 2010 movie. This is just after Elise enters the story, in which she’s staring into a dark corner of the Lambert’s house, whispering at Specs while he furiously draws the entity that she’s seeing. We don’t see what Elise is looking at or what Specs is drawing, we don’t even hear what Elise is saying. All we hear is pen scratching paper and a terrified mumble, along with a visual of Elise frozen in fear. With all her experience, what could she possibly be seeing that’s causing this reaction?
This scene has everything that a good horror should: unsettling sound, terrified reactions, intrigue, suspense of satisfaction. Everything works to unsettle and worry you, more than simply get a scared reaction out of you. You’re not jumping out of your seat, you’re sweating at the possibility of what’s to come. That is good horror, and exactly what its sequels missed, though it was partially regained with this new movie — at least with, and possibly limited to, its opening scene.
Insidious: Out of The Further does something very interesting with its scares that I really hope is intentional. While much of this movie consists of jumps, which I really don’t care for, many of them seem to have knowledge of what we’ve seen in the trailer and make us wait.
A lot of the time, when you’re watching a movie whose trailers have been plastered absolutely everywhere for the past three months, you tend to look for those ‘trailer scenes’ in the actual movie — I still vividly remember parts of Furiosa, just because of how many times I was forced to watch the trailer. This means, especially with horror, that you’ll see a familiar place and remember that you’re in a cinema, watching a movie, rather than experiencing this story. You end up spending that entire scene just waiting for the jump that you’ve already seen a thousand times before you even sat down.
Out of The Further will take you to these familiar places, like the pillow fort or the dentist’s office, show you around, then leave. No satisfaction. Sometimes, it’ll just hold you there much longer than you could’ve expected. At first you’re sitting there watching, thinking “that one scare will come up in about thirty seconds”, then a minute later you’re still there. Then two minutes. Then three. By this time, you’ve sunk back in your chair, engrossed once again. Is this moment even actually coming up? Finally, it does, just as you were getting comfortable and started experiencing this movie again, allowing it to finally shock you, just as intended. This obviously isn’t the first to keep you in suspense of a scare you know is around the corner, but does it well nonetheless. Of course, if this wasn’t intentional then everything you just read was useless and you should take half a star away from my rating.
While I’ve only covered this movie’s positives so far, it’s definitely not hard to forget its negatives — because they take up some of the most important parts of, not just this movie, but a movie in general. Namely, many of the scares are just jumps which I absolutely hate, because of how cheap they are. You haven’t earned my heart rate spike and your movie isn’t scary just because a demon runs at the screen really fast. Real horror is earned. I want to be unsettled more than outright scared, if anything. This is why some of the all-time great horrors are slow. The Shining, Alien, Get Out. Their main objective with their scares aren’t to scare you at all, but to put you into the shoes of Wendy, or Ripley, or Chris. The only thing that manages to achieve this, for me, in Out of The Further was simply the design of Cyrus, the movie’s villain.
Narratively, this manages to become quite weak. There really isn’t much that happens in the middle, I think this could’ve worked just as well being even thirty minutes shorter. A lot of this is unnecessary, it simply rehashes a lot of what we’ve already seen with more, increasingly unnecessary examples of how the Acolytes are terrorising Gemma.
I feel incredibly mixed about this movie as a whole. I think it’s easily the best of the Insidious franchise and finally gives us something new, though its cheap scares and often just simply quite boring story bring this down so much that I can’t let it slide on comparison alone. As an Insidious movie, this is absolutely incredible, as a wider horror movie, Out of The Further proves to be perfectly average in almost every way.