Movie Review: Insidious

After nineteen hours in five sessions under the needle I finally got my Darth Vader tattoo finished. Oh yeah, I did it. The relationship I developed with the artist/owner resulted in his generously donating his free preview movie passes to Insidious to me. In the past few years I have become something of a horror movie aficionado and this one didn't disappoint.

From the makers of Paranormal Activity and Saw, Insidious is, for all intents and purposes, a re-visitation of Poltergeist, the only popular horror film in history to deal with the repressed fear of child abduction, until now. In this version, the child's body remains in the earthly realm while his "astral projection" is held captive in a hellish netherworld called "the further" by entities with an "insidious agenda."

The premise gives rise to myriad thrills and chills in both this realm and "the further" with visually spectacular demons, monsters, ghosts, and a particularly disturbing twilight-zone-like setting in the netherworld. The film is filled with all manner of horrific deliciousness and even includes some refreshing comic relief which openly ridicules its own horror genre. In this case the comedy is accomplished with a requisite pair of ghost-hunting buffoons reminiscent of the Ghostbusters, or the Frog Brothers from The Lost Boys.

This is a great film. Unlike its production predecessors, it makes no effort at faux-documentary realism (as with Paranormal Activity a la Blair Witch Project), nor does it fall back on the easy emotional and gore spectacle of torture porn (as with Saw). It's just a good ol' fashioned horror film, but it has some fantastic innovations. There are some contrived plot conventions, and more than one moment of absurdism, but the film is unencumbered with the heavy emotion elicited by torture porn, or abused children, which one uncomfortably assumes will be the premise from the outset. Ultimately, it relies a little too heavily on the visual shock that had me jumping out of my seat at an exhausting rate, but the visuals that caused these moments were absolutely chilling. Insidious will leave you with powerful, if not somewhat clichéd images, that will haunt your visual memory for days after. I like it more today than right after I saw it. Very cool. 4/5 stars.