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N FILMMAKING, IT’S NOT UNCOMMON FOR AN ACTOR OR CREW MEMBER TO TAKE ON MANY ROLES. But it’s still a surprise to find the same person was responsible for creating both Insidious’ scary music score and portraying its scariest entity. Joseph Bishara, the film’s composer,


also fills in as the movie’s fiery-faced, cloven-hoofed demon. “I was already bald, and I’m the right build,” he says of


director James Wan’s casting choice. “They actually ended up designing the demon based on pictures of me.” Despite his lack of formal acting experience, Bishara


found it rather easy to handle the daily four-hour makeup job, plus get inside the mindset of his character. “‘Demon’ is the best way to describe him,” he says. “I


don’t really know that he has a motivation. He just does what he does.” What Bishara normally does in films is take care of the


tunes. His composing credits include scores for The Con- vent, The Gravedancers and Autopsy, as well as music supervision for Repo! The Genetic Opera, and producing and mixing music for many film trailers. He had previously worked with Wan on a short called Doggie Heaven but this was their first major collaboration. “I like darker sounds, so this was an opportunity to re-


ally let loose creatively,” says the composer. “I pretty much said yes based on the idea, and before James even shot, I had written over an hour of material based just on the script.” From the ear-piercing string sting in the opening titles,


the sound of Insidious is suitably unsettling. Bishara de- scribes the score as a mix of “modern classical and oth- erworldly design.” Unlike his previous electronic-industrial material, it takes full advantage of orchestral instrumen- tation. He acquired the use of a rotted, rusted piano and a string quartet, both of which he used to experiment. “For one piece, the quartet was instructed to psychically


feel the next note, to try to anticipate what it might be,” he explains. “We were in the bottom of the house, in a dark room, playing along to this series of tones they hadn’t heard before and trying to push into the psychic mind.” As for being able to make his own


character extra scary through sound, Bishara says he doesn’t analyze the fear factor too much. “I hope the demon comes


across scary, but in the moment it’s really about getting out of the way completely. And when I get out of the way, what comes through is generally scary stuff.”


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Paranormal Activities: Elise prepares to contact the spirit world, (below) Renai (Rose Byrne) hears some- thing on the baby monitor, and (inset) the demon (Joseph Bishara) lurks behind Josh (Patrick Wilson).


the logical choice to protect their family in a way that most other haunted movie protagonists can’t seem to fathom: if something in your home is scaring the bejesus out of you, it’s high time to seriously consider buggering off. “One of the reasons the great haunted house


movies work is that the actors feel like normal people and the audience can relate to them,” notes Wan.“Patrick and Rose brought so much to the film because they came across as real people. I truly be- lieve that this film works so well because you buy them as an everyday couple. They really brought that sense of reality to the movie. Let me put it this way: if I would’ve cast Jason Statham as the father, you’d think that’s not believable because he’d just kick the ghosts’ asses.” There is one major shift in the film’s tone, however,


designed as comic relief. At one point the family hires a crew of paranormal investigators, who show up with a truck full of gadgets. Whannell plays Specs, while Australian actor Sampson plays Tucker – com- ically antagonistic co-workers in the employ of a medium named Elise (character actor Lin Shaye). Though seemingly an unnecessarily lighthearted nod to the scenes in Poltergeist with the medium played by Zelda Rubinstein, Whannell argues that this isn’t the case. “It actually wasn’t an homage, even though James


and I are big fans of Poltergeist. The ghostbuster characters, even though I’m reticent to call them ghostbusters because of the comic connotations, are there for tension release. One thing James and I learned while making Saw is that if you don’t give the audience a place to laugh, they’ll find their own place and they’ll laugh at something you don’t want them to laugh at. Seeing as the entire film is sort of balancing on a


knife’s edge, it’s this slow build-up of tension, it’s very creepy, by halfway through the film – if you’re doing your job right and the audience is enjoying it – it’s full to bursting, so you need somewhere to relieve the tension.” The man responsible for much of that tension is


Joseph Bishara, who scored Insidious (see sidebar). While writing the script, Whannell gave Wan a disc of music he’d made to help set the tone of the story (“Really avant garde pieces, very atonal, not tradi- tional, like Krzysztof Penderecki’s stuff or the Kronos Quartet – all these scratchy violins and other crazy stuff,” says Whannell), and that would help form Bishara’s score. Yet the filmmakers weren’t done with him there. They liked Bishara’s look – a slight frame and shaved head – and cast him in the movie as a particularly nasty demonic entity. “It’s kind of like if Hans Zimmer played Freddy


Krueger,” jokes Whannell. “I don’t know if that com- bination has ever occurred before.” The filmmakers had the latitude to make such an


unusual choice because they were back to working on a small budget after the disastrous experience of making the $30 million Dead Silence for Universal. Wan won’t reveal the budget for Insidious but says it was even less than that of the original Saw, which was made for $1.2 million. The indie picture is the first production out of a five-picture deal made by the producers of Paranormal Activity – including that film’s writer and director, Oren Peli – with Canadian distributor Alliance. “The low-budget nature of it turns out to be a huge


advantage,” affirms Wan of why he and Whannell jumped at Peli’s offer to back the film. “We had such a strong vision for this film, we didn’t want people to fuck with it. We were very lucky to have strong pro- ducers who supported us and really backed us up. ... I’ve told people that although Insidious is probably the lowest-budget movie I’ve made, I think it’s the best film I’ve made as a director.”


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