Insidious (2010)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

Insidious (2010) – J. Wan

There certainly are a lot of supernatural horror movies from the last decade or so – but their ratings on various websites suggest that they are mostly duds.  However, Insidious spawned a few remakes (not a sign of quality these days, of course) and seemed to have purposefully avoided gore/ultra-violence, so I checked it out.  And… it definitely is a genre film.  Which made me think about what I expect from genre films – do they need to be creative? Do they need to do more than satisfyingly include the central features of the form? Of course, in asking that question, I immediately realised that the best genre films (for example, in film noir or the western) start with the key elements of plot or style and then innovate within these.  So, let’s just say that Insidious begins with the key elements of the haunted house genre (bumps in the night, objects moving on their own) and then adds a little bit from the demonic possession genre (as Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson discover when one of their kids falls into a sort of coma) and finally just cops huge chunks from Poltergeist (1982).  So, there is not much original here at all and precious little innovation.  But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t some moments where I had the chills and I certainly laughed wryly as various stereotypic plot elements turned up (perhaps with a bit of a sly wink from the cast or director).  The good news is that the film never really falls apart (even if we don’t always identify with any of the characters), so with that in mind, it’s an okay genre excursion from Malaysian-Australian director James Wan (who also did The Conjuring, reviewed here, and, uh, Saw, which I won’t watch) but it’s nothing more.