SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.I love how the introduction shot is not of Dalton but is instead of a young Josh. It’s a good bit of foreshadowing that Dalton’s issues are a subset of Josh’s issues and that the latter’s precede the formers. When the younger Dalton shows up in “The Further” and points a direction, it not only suggests that “The Further” is bound to time in a non-linear fashion, but it also ties the resolution of Dalton’s trauma with his son’s own trauma.

2.The way Wan sets up the house as the source of the hauntings is well done and still ends up paying out by the end. The repetition of establishing shots of the house, especially after key moments of discord, teases us towards thinking its the source of the spectral entities. This also plays off of genre conventions. As a result, when the family finally moves, the audience is thrown off guard and can’t figure out how the problem persists.

However, even after Elise reveals the spectral happenings are due to Dalton and Josh’s astral projections, the house still serves a purpose as the primary environment that Josh has to navigate from “the Further” dimension. The same house we spent 30 minutes in gets covered in haze, cool blues, and swaths of darkness all of which serve to transform the location into the menace we were teased to believe it originally was.

While in “the Further”, Josh comes upon what appears to be a family in the living room who appear still like wax dolls. However, Josh confirms they are very much not inert when he closely examines one of them and sees movement. Then he finds a young woman with a gun and asks her for where his son is. She disappears from frame and gun-shots are heard. Josh goes downstairs to see the previous family now having been shot again.

Given Elise’s descriptions of “the Further”, specters trapped here are caught in cycles of repetition. If so, this destruction of the family happening in the “inverted” domestic residence seems like a continuation of the above themes. The family is unable to protect itself. The scene itself is disturbing because these spirits are already “dead”, so the fact that they are inert and only replay the moment of their death eternally is extremely nihilistic; all they have is death waiting for them even while dead.

3. The nursery scene from Insidious is one of the scariest scenes in recent horror fare and gets under my skin in the same way the infamous Repulsion “man in the mirror” scare does. Here, the scene starts with Renai telling Josh about the issue she’s had in the day dealing with noises in the nursery and the voice telling her off. As she gets into it, the noise is interrupted by a series of loud knocks from downstairs. Unease builds.

Josh goes downstairs to deal with the interruption, but then the baby monitor goes off and Renai runs to the nursery only to see a dark presence standing behind her child. The room has been charged with the feeling of omen in three instances up till now: first, when the baby monitor interrupts Renai as she plays music; second, when the room is illuminated by the red light right before Dalton becomes comatose; third, when Renai hears the voice on the monitor speaking in threatening fashion. These moments all come together in this moment right after we’re reminded of the issue by the conversation that starts the sequence. The red light, the spirit who growled on the phone, a baby in peril; just as we’re reminded of the nursery problems, all the issues surrounding it come together in a moment that’s shocking, well earned, and truly demonstrates just what trouble the Lambert family is in.

Seeing the spirit just standing there ominously makes the terror of what’s going on worse; he has all the power and can do whatever he wants when he wants. The Lamberts are unable to stop him. The loud discordant noise that accompanies soon after accentuates this already present feeling which is why it works so well.

As soon as Renai gets Kali, she meets up with Josh again to talk about the situation, but the couple is interrupted once again by loud noises coming from elsewhere; this time the alarm is blaring. Josh runs down to check and sees that the front door is open. The house is no longer secure – a confirmation of a fact we were just made aware of in the nursery room just before. Josh is unable to find the intruder despite searching the house. The scene ends with a shot of the house in front and center of the frame – the happenings in it are here to stay.

All these confirmations compound on one another, letting the signs set up earlier in the film to accumulate into moments of sheer terror. The sound design constantly interrupts moments of peace which sustain the sense of doom from start to finish. The end result is a sequence which truly scares.

4.The scene of Renai getting acclimated to her new house builds upon and delivers the scares set up during her stay in the first house. Once again, she plays music, this time from a recording as opposed to playing it herself, to set a calming mood around her and proceeds with her tasks. The camera tracks her from inside the house, as though it’s an agent viewing her, while she takes the garbage out.

While she accomplishes her chore, the music she put on changes. She looks in from the window and sees a child dancing next to her player. An intruder is here and her aural space has been intruded upon again. (This song will make another appearance when Josh tries to save Dalton, this time emanating from the Lipstick-Face demon’s lair.) Desperate to find the intruder, she checks both her son’s rooms only to be surprised by the specter which jumps out at her and runs off. It may not have done anything “scary”, but the experience and the context in which it occurs is damning. The Lambert’s cannot escape the experience following them and there’s no way for them to heal.

5.The séance scene starts off with the characters turning off a red lamp in the back and using a lantern as the primary source of light. The attempt at removing evil requires an opposite light. The gas mask Elise wears adds to the creepy ambiance of the moment gives Wan a chance to introduce whispers into the soundscape. The out loud repetition of the words by Specs (Leigh Whannell) on top of the writing he does constantly reinforces the nature of “the Further” without giving away what it looks like or is. The ambiguity makes the nature of Dalton’s fears more palpable. Additionally, the description of the Red Face/Lipstick-Face Demon as having fire for his head perfectly encapsulates the visual motifs used to indicate said specters influence up to this point.

6.While Josh tries to get himself and Dalton out of “the Further”, the movie cuts between 3 interrelated sections: Dalton confronting the Lipstick-Face demon, Josh confronting the Old Woman(Philip Friedman), Renai and company trying to help the father-son duo make their way back. The intercutting makes it seem like the movements are all linked in one movement; the success compound, so if one party succeeds it should bleed over. It starts off with the father and son separating once they enter the house where their bodies lie. Josh confronts the Old Woman while Dalton squares off against the Red-Face demon. Immediately after Dalton runs away from his demon towards his body, the film cuts to Josh’s similar confrontation with the Old Woman. The two moments are linked – the battles are tied with one another. Or so we think.

Josh’s confrontation with the Old Woman even features an inspired wipe transition that uses the wall as a black wipe to show the connection between Josh’s internal struggle and Renai’s struggle outside to get him to follow her voice. Specters start to invade the “real world” like zombies; their rapid intrusion feels like something out of a George Romero movie and accentuates the stakes at risk. The fact that these scenes are bleeding into one another both in diegetic and non-diegetic fashion makes every parallel between the three sequences more prominent – we think there’s a pattern.

The film cuts from Josh being surrounded by specters in the real world to a POV shot of a spirit going closer to him in “the Further”. We see him yelling at the “Old Woman” who starts to retreat as if in response to his demands. We think he’s won the battle and is going back to his body. Then we see a similar POV shot of a spirit going into Dalton’s body which cuts to “Dalton” waking up in the real world. In our minds, both father and son have made it home after successfully confronting their demons.

It feels like order has been restored and the film even shows Specs and Tucker (Angus Sampson) sitting casually afterwards, talking about what they’re going to do with the footage. This makes the reveal that Josh has been possessed all the more striking. The illusion of safety is shattered, Elise who was thought to be victorious is dead, and Renai who thought her family could finally move on is now further enmeshed in the supernatural trappings of “the Further”

Just like The Silence of the Lambs famous parallel editing misdirect scene, this scene in Insidious uses audience expectations and conventions against them via cuts and audience lack of information. There’s no lying going on and the scenes can actually be viewed as truth of the film’s ending. The POV shot goes into Josh happens before his confrontation with the Old Woman. Given how fast she runs away, it could be that she distracted Josh and then ran off to his body while he was yelling, locating and getting to it before he could. With the unexplained nature of spirits and what “the Further” allows, it’s believable and expected that spirits who have been in the area would be able to navigate and deceive within it to get what they want. This works, because Dalton’s POV shot is followed by him waking up which would entail there was “no time” for other spirits to get in.