Review of Insidious (2011) by Shiira — 13 Apr 2011

For God's sake! Get out! That's the tagline sprawled across the movie poster for Stuart Rosenberg's "The Amityville Horror", the 1979 shocker about the haunted goings-on at George and Kathy Lutz's Long Island residence, adapted from the supposed non-fiction bestseller by Jay Anson.

The promotional admonition has the unintentional effect of drawing a bead on that most annoying of all haunted house movie tropes, which is the irrationally slow realization on the ghost-afflicted victims' part that they don't actually have to coexist with the growing menace.

They can, in fact, leave, right after the first unexplained door slam. The Lutzs, in particular, are especially obstinate in their steadfast refusal to flee like normal people, holding down the fort as they do til the last possible moment, even though the daughter communicates with a dead girl.

Also, George's demonic possession is confused for the flu, and the flies attack like piranhas. Best of all, nobody seems adequately fazed by the portal to hell that the family dog first sniffs out in the basement.

The Dutch Colonial literally has to ooze blood before George and Kathy come to their senses and finally abdicate themselves from the supernatural plot of land. To be fair, if the characters in horror movies could take a hint, the film would be over in a matter of minutes.

In a sense, characters in horror movies need to act as if they have brain damage. Characters like the Lutzs have to put themselves in harm's way for the sake of running time. But the best of the bunch, like Oren Peli's "Paranormal Activity" and Tobe Hooper's "Poltergeist", go through the trouble of providing the terrorized people with a bonafide reason to stay in the house, an incentive for the emotional violence that they'll have to endure during their long, drawn-out ordeal with the unexplained phenomena.

As a result, their dealing with the malevolent presence feels more organic to the story, and not merely a screenwriter's contrivance. For instance, in "Paranormal Activity", the young couple puts up with the disturbances in their troubled home because Micah is shooting a documentary film.

Differing from other like-minded genre fare, for the amateur filmmaker, it's a bad day if nothing out of the ordinary happens. It's in Micah's best interest to be scared. (Not so much, Katie's.) The Steven Spielberg-produced "Poltergeist", the movie that "Insidious" most resembles, initially anyway, comes equipped with a practical basis for keeping Steve and Diane Freeling(Craig T.

Nelson & JoBeth Williams) in their suburban dwelling. The house eats their daughter. They're not going anywhere until their tract home regurgitates Carol Anne(Heather O'Rourke). Homologous in cause, Josh(Patrick Wilson) and Renai(Rose Byrne) aren't going anywhere either, since their son Dalton(Ty Simpkins) needs to find his way back to the body that he transcended through astral projection.

Smarter than most genre films of its ilk, the Lamberts leave their thought-to-be haunted home(their first house) midway through the narrative, since Renai, having witnessed enough phantoms to last her a lifetime, doesn't wait for things to get worse.

Even better, Josh believes her, foregoing the patented cliche of the skeptic telling the eyewitness that in no certain terms that the person who cries ghost is crazy. In the time-honored tradition of the haunted house movie, by the time the unconverted sees the menace for himself, it's too late, and both eyewitness and former skeptic run for their lives.

In "Insidious", just like the Tobe Hooper film, a parent has to retrieve the child from the netherworld, a domestic-based interior universe. (In retrospect, the husband in "Poltergeist" is kind of a p*ssy for not insisting harder that he should be the one to go retrieve Carol Anne.

The wife could have worked the rope.) Ironically, when Josh and Renai change addresses, they are unknowingly abandoning their son, since Dalton's floating self is on the "further" side of the house, similar to the Freeling girl's situation.

Being smart becomes a wrong move. Being dumb would have kept them closer to their wandering son. On his own, Dalton would have never found the new house had Josh not gone looking for him, when "Insidious" visualizes what "Poltergeist" only suggests: a dark underworld, a purgatory-like crawl space that traps children.

Mick Jones of The Clash once asked, "Should I Stay or Should I Go," and in "Insidious", this reasonably scary exercise in genre proves that there's no right move in a horror movie, just like how a nightmare should be.