Boo! Haunted-house shock show Insidious packs solid scares
by Steve Erickson
Back when the team of director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell introduced the world to torture-porn with Saw in 2004, their major offense was not super-villain Jigsaw's odd philosophy of improving people's lives through torture, but Wan's total incompetence at directing actors. Eli Roth's Hostel, the other source text of this sub-genre, is well-made enough that its xenophobia and general ugliness carries a real sting. By contrast, Wan couldn't even get Cary Elwes to do a consistent American accent, and even an old pro like Danny Glover seemed lost under his direction.
The PG-13 rated Insidious is a change of tone for Wan and Whannell. Fortunately, practice has honed their craft, if not made it perfect. The set-up is reliable haunted-house hokum: The Lampert family has recently moved into a new home, where composer Renai (Rose Byrne) and teacher Josh (Patrick Wilson) sense a ghostly presence. At first, it's easy to write off the initial eerie events, but then their oldest son becomes comatose. Doctors can't explain what's wrong; the family moves into a new house, but the haunting continues. Desperate, they call on a trio of ghost hunters for help.
Insidious aims to be the ultimate post-Poltergeist suburban horror film: Despite the current dismal economic climate, the Lamperts have no trouble immediately moving into a new home. The movie's strongest at showing how technologies meant to reassure us wind up actually making us more anxious. Renai listens to a baby monitor obsessively. At one point, it transmits the voice of a threatening adult, followed by gunshots. Of course, when she goes to check on her baby, no one's there.
If Wan's direction of actors has improved greatly from Saw, Whannell's dialogue still sounds clunky. The movie seems more confident paying homage to The Exorcist and The Shining than describing married life or parenthood from the inside, a great source of the afore-mentioned Poltergeist's appeal. While they may have forsaken gore, they haven't abandoned shock tactics — starting with composer Joseph Bishara's score, a nonstop assault of swooping strings and piano stabs pillaged from the Avant-Classical 101 Songbook.
More often than not, though, they pull off their scares with a horror fan's infectious glee. If Insidious doesn't quite have a handle on American suburbia, it sets up a welcome sense of humor amidst several genuinely spooky set pieces, including a seance and a journey to the astral plane that puts a parental spin on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Insidious has no higher ambition than to scare the audience, and it succeeds much of the time.
