28: Insidious

The second truly scary movie directed by James Wan, Insidious is an imperfect film. The parts that work really work, and the parts that don't really don't. But underneath its problems with writing and pacing, there is a genuinely chilling ghost story with a unique and interesting visual style.

The film is at its best in the first hour. Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne) is being haunted by ghosts after one of her three sons, Dalton (Ty simpkins), falls into a coma. Her husband is avoiding the problem by taking on increasing responsibility at work, leaving her home alone to be terrorized. Most of the scares occur during the daytime, which is a bold move that helps the film stand out. She is completely alone during the day, but she can't leave her son in a coma to the ghosts. It is a great setup, and it comes with a great payoff.

There is one scene in particular that really makes this film a must watch in my opinion. It happens right after the family moves out of their house and into a new, hopefully less haunted one. Once again, it is broad daylight. The soundtrack is entertainer Tiny Tim's “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (You might know Tiny Tim best from the pilot episode of Spongebob Squarepants). The ghost is just a small child. And yet, it is still bone-chillingly terrifying. I've studied this scene trying to figure out what makes it so good, and I haven't figured it out.

But, with a film like insidious, it is hard to gush about all the things it does right forever. The film has some real structural problems that drag it down. The film is guilty of a major plot dump about an hour into it, in which a paranormal expert talks nonstop for five minutes about the finer points of astral projection. About ten minutes later, she does it again, this time about her previous history with the family.

The story lacks cohesion. The first hour is all about the mother being terrorized by ghosts. But in the second half, the father ends up the protagonist. The film can never really decide whether it wants Dalton to be an actual character or just a mcguffin. There are actually two other children in the film, but they seem to disappear into the aether whenever they aren't saying something creepy. And each person seems to have their own personal ghost who wants to kill them and them alone for some arbitrary reason (and what's worse, Dalton's ghost looks like Darth Maul). In the end, the problem is that its not a family being haunted; it is a succession of individuals who live in the same house being haunted one at a time.

Its hard to argue that Insidious is a great film, but it does still manage to be a great horror film. James Wan squeezes dread out of every frame. Each scene manages to scare you in a new way. From a paranormal expert performing a séance while wearing a world war 2 era gas mask to a family of ghosts with demonic smiles that stand as still as mannequins, its pretty hard to not be impressed by the visuals he presents.