Can the Insidious franchise maintain its consistency for longer than James Wan’s other ghostly property, The Conjuring?
Insidious: Chapter 3 has a very familiar feel to it. Honestly, when you watch as many horror movies as I do, they all start to have a vaguely familiar feel, especially if they fall within the oft-explored landscape of “haunting” movies. Whether the haunting in question is of a house or a person or an item, these stories tend to travel well-worn paths, and the same could be said of zombie films or slashers, et cetera, et cetera. More specifically, though, the post-Saw James Wan cinematic universe traffics in an even more refined and deliberate set of tropes. There is typically a central family made up of salt-of-the-earth types who are fundamentally good people. They have their own mundane struggles that make their situation tenuous before the supernatural problems start to arrive, but it is never in question that they are fundamentally worth saving. In this movie, the family is made up of a single father (the always welcome Dermot Mulroney) and his two teenage children, older sister Quinn and younger brother Alex. There will always be a seemingly malevolent spirit that attaches themselves to one of the characters – in this case Quinn – leading to ever escalating horrors that the family doesn’t know how to deal with. That leads them to seek expertise, which invariably comes in the form of earnest, altruistic experts of the spiritual realm. In The Conjuring films, those experts are the Warrens, but in Insidious 3, that role falls to Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier, the retired demonologist who also appears in the prior two installments. There is no surprise in the setup, but Wan’s team knows how to make these types of stories work, and that holds true for this prequel installment into the franchise.
Since it’s a prequel, we have some early knowledge about which characters are definitely going to make it through. The tension lies in making us wonder about the other characters, in this instance the family of half-way possessed Quinn. None of these movies features much of a body count, but the filmmakers go out of their way to put Quinn through the ringer. At one point I found it almost comical the number of casts and neck braces she had on, and of course the demon possessing her has no compunction about putting her already broken body through more intense pain to accomplish its goals. The story is as much Elise’s as it is Quinn’s, however, and Shaye does an admirable job of keeping us invested despite the fact that we know she is set to show up in the (chronologically) next story. Part of that is another Wan trope – the saintly demon expert always has a spiritual nemesis they have picked up from prior exploits that looks to complicate matters. The other part of it is simply that the characters in these films are just so easy to root for. In a genre that frequently has contempt for its protagonists and invites you to relish in their demise, Wan and company go hard in the other direction, convincing you to invest heavily in the safety of all of the human players in the story. That’s really the key to their success. If you don’t care about what happens to the characters, then you are left to focus on the mechanics of what happens – does this look cool, is it plausible, is it new or creative. That type of thing is always important, but the filmmakers buy themselves some grace in that department if your first instinct is simply to fret over the outcome instead of dispassionately picking apart the scene. The InsidiSiniConjureverse traffics in a pretty standard stock of spooks and scares, but it doesn’t matter because of your investment into the heroes of the story. It doesn’t hurt that they really know how to pull off those spooks and scares in an effective manner, and I was never taken out of Insidious 3 by some dodgy CGI or incompetent jump scares (which is not something I can say about some of the latter Conjuring sequels).
If you can’t tell, I quite liked the third Insidious movie. This franchise is one that I will likely return to over and over, just because it makes great, atmospheric background noise for the season, and it isn’t so scary or vulgar that I’m worried about my kids wandering by while its on. The first Conjuring movie remains the gold standard for the ever-expanding James Wan empire, but I’m happy to discover another solid entry into that world.
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