stars Patrick Wilson (Hard Candy, Watchmen) and Rose Byrne (Sunshine, 28 Weeks Later) as married couple Josh and Renai, who, along with their three children, move into a creaky suburban house. What starts out as a series of subtle disturbances – a few books falling off a shelf, a misplaced box – escalates to doors being flung open in the middle of the night and ghostly figures appearing throughout the home. But then their eldest son, Dalton, slips into a coma (it’s not technically a coma, we eventually learn, but something more troubling) and the paranormal activity reaches a fright- ening crescendo. Josh and Renai resort to drastic measures, including hir- ing paranormal investigators (Angus Sampson and Whannell), and eventually learn that more than just the house is haunted. Josh’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey (“James and I had to resist asking her too many questions about The Entity,” admits Whannell), reveals a disturbing family secret that forces Josh to enter the dangerous spirit world called The Fur- ther in search of his son. “I felt that Dead Silence was really never the film it should have been,
for many reasons I won’t go in to – all the horror stories that you hear about studios happened to us on that film,” says Whannell. “So we felt like we owed it to ourselves to make our definitive horror film.” Wan and Whannell had been talking about doing a haunted house movie
as far back as 2000, when they were in film school together. Even while developing Saw, they would sit around and try to scare each other with ghost stories. Whannell had always been fascinated by tales of the super- natural, while Wan was steeped in ghostly folklore stemming from his Malaysian background. “One particular superstitious story that [Malaysians] have is the idea that
when you sleep, your soul leaves your body and it travels, it wanders,” says Wan. “That’s why you have dreams, your soul wanders off to a different plane or a different location, or travels back in memory. The superstitious belief is that if someone is sleeping, you should not draw on their face be- cause if the soul returns and doesn’t recognize the face, it keeps moving, looking for its host. So that figured into the overall conceit of Insidious.” The phrase “scary as hell” is overused and rarely applied honestly, but
it’s accurate here. The dread creeps into Insidious slowly, as the malevolent spirits reveal themselves gradually, like a virus taking over the characters’ happy home. The thick and terrifying atmosphere eventually gives way to
escalating hair-on-the-back-of- your-neck scares. When the film premiered last September in the Toronto International Film Festival Midnight Madness program, audi- ence reaction went from stone-cold silence, to audible gasps, to outright screams. In a cynical age of remakes, rip-offs, cheap sequels and formulaic filmmaking aimed at undiscerning teen audiences, Insidious is sin- cere and very, very effective at pushing movie- goers’ buttons. As Whannell explains, it was all carefully
planned from the screenwriting stage, when he and Wan started taking stock of the clichés they saw as being the ruin of most modern horror movies. “I drew up a list of things I just didn’t want us
to do. It’s not actually jump-scares that I hate, it’s the false scares, or the false jump-scares. It’s where somebody opens that bathroom mir- ror cabinet to get their toothpaste out and of course when they shut it, there’s someone
standing behind them. Huge orchestra sting – DUHHHN! – and the audience jumps. Of course, the person standing behind them is just a brother or a mother, not the bad guy. That to me is a false scare. It’s having the audience at a knife’s edge. You got ’em, they’re tense, the main character opens the closet and – MR- RRAW! – a cat jumps out. It’s become such a tired trope of today’s horror films that [the studio execs] must’ve worked out some kind of graph where they’ve looked at it and said, ‘We need a jump scare every five minutes!’ Now, if you’re going to have a jump scare every five minutes, it’s not possible for all of them to be life-threat- ening bad guy situations, so 70 percent of them are going to have to be the cat, or a friend, or my personal ‘favourite,’ the best friend knocking on your car window to give you your credit card back. ‘Ah, dude! You scared the hell outta me!’ I hate it!” You won’t find the spectres in Insidious show-
ing up in bathroom mirrors, but you will see them in places you don’t quite expect, some- times right in your face, accompanied by a sting on the soundtrack, other times standing quietly in the frame, waiting to be noticed, with no mu- sical cues to prepare the viewer. The interplay between the shocks and subtle scares ratchets up the tension even further. Though there are obvious nods to many of the filmmakers’ favourite haunted house movies, such as The Haunting, The Exorcist and The Shining, the plot of Insidious veers off in some unexpected direc- tions. Without giving too much away, it actually subverts many of the conceits of the subgenre. “One of the things Leigh and I wanted to do
was to make a haunted house film that wasn’t ultimately a haunted house film,” says Wan. “We’d embrace what we love about haunted movies, classic staples like a creaking door, or a rocking chair, or you think you hear some- thing. Embrace all the good stuff and subvert all the bad stuff that’s become overused in horror movies in general.” Wan also points out that sometimes it’s sim-
Bump In The Night: Specs (Leigh Whannell) and medium Elise (Lin Shaye), (top left) ghost girls inspired by The Shining, and (top right) a fractured family portrait.
ply a matter of employing “common sense” by having realistic characters make the same de- cisions that the average audience member would employ. Perhaps the most satisfying scene in Insidious sees Josh and Renai make
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