A late-movie twist in Insidious corrects that [retroactive spoilers!]. That it was done on a tiny budget ($1.5 million!) just makes me love it all the more.
It starts out as a deceptively conventional haunted house movie. Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) Lambert have just moved house along with their brood - pre-teens Dalton (Ty Simpkins) and Foster (Andrew Astor), plus a baby girl. They have barely settled into the house when Dalton... just doesn't wake up; he's gone into a coma state that no doctor can explain.
Months pass without his condition changing, and in the meanwhile, ghostly activity has gone haywire. The house had strange little quirks - stuff would get misplaced, thrown out of the shelves, supernatural pranks like that. But now random spooks are appearing all over the place, triggering the alarms at night... it gets to the point where the family has to pack up and move to another huge house.
How they can afford that, with only one working adult (a secondary school teacher, at that!) is probably the most unrealistic event portrayed in the movie.
How they can afford that, with only one working adult (a secondary school teacher, at that!) is probably the most unrealistic event portrayed in the movie.
Anyhow. The haunting resumes almost immediately at the Lamberts' new home, leading them to contact a team of parapsychologists led by a psychic (Lin Shaye) to try and figure out what's going on. And... that they do: the third act of this movie kind of goes off the rails, in a good way. The explanation is kind of goofy but internally consistent, original and fun. More importantly, the stage is set for some really imaginative low-budget madness of the underworld-spelunking kind.
It's not (unlike Poltergeist) perfect. The low budget means that ghosts are basically presented as regular people in spooky makeup, which does drain their mystique a little, and there's even a sloppy brawl with one of them. The main bad guy kept reminding me of the villain from Episode One (Darth Insidious?)
But the atmosphere is expertly judged and the filmmaking is so precise and energetic (DPs: David Brewer and John Leonetti) that these are minor complaints; the film is as well-crafted during its slow burn as it is when at full manic mode, building a land of the dead out of a collection of dimly lit rooms.
There's excellent use of negative space throughout, a lot of neat tension-building devices, some pretty effective, well-paced jump scares and more than a few cool camera angles. A particularly showy one shows a scene through the whirring blades of a ceiling fan- no wonder director James Wan would later homage Russell Mulcahy in Malignant.
But the atmosphere is expertly judged and the filmmaking is so precise and energetic (DPs: David Brewer and John Leonetti) that these are minor complaints; the film is as well-crafted during its slow burn as it is when at full manic mode, building a land of the dead out of a collection of dimly lit rooms.
There's excellent use of negative space throughout, a lot of neat tension-building devices, some pretty effective, well-paced jump scares and more than a few cool camera angles. A particularly showy one shows a scene through the whirring blades of a ceiling fan- no wonder director James Wan would later homage Russell Mulcahy in Malignant.
Both Wan and writer Leigh Whannell made their name with Saw, a movie I still think fucking sucks; They have since redeemed themselves several times over, together and separately. The Conjuring might be their most popular film, but this one remains the scariest thanks to an edge that movie lacks (despite this being PG13, and The Conjuring having an R-rating). It's a silly, sometimes ridiculous horror movie, sure- but it packs a punch nonetheless.
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