(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) With the Insidious films and this summer’s terrific The Conjuring, Wan almost seems as if he’s trying to impose a course correction. All of them rely on old-fashioned spooksmanship and filmmaking precision, the ability to summon up scares by placing the camera just so and creeping through darkened hallways and up to ominous-looking closets at just the right pace to give viewers the willies. (And, as science has shown, set hearts racing.)

(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) After a flashback that reveals protagonist Josh Lambert had some dealings with the supernatural as a child, the film picks up where the first Insidious left off, with the adult Josh (Patrick Wilson) in custody for the mysterious death of ghost hunter Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), and his wife Renai being questioned by the police about the event. With no proof of Josh’s involvement, the police let the Lambert family go, and they settle into a creepy old Victorian that’s been in Josh’s family for generations. With some help from Josh’s mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) they attempt to resume their old lives, but it seems as if the spirits are a little less eager to resume their old afterlives. Also still in the picture: Elise’s ghost-hunting pals Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Whannell, who has written a fun role for himself again).



(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) Could all this have something to do with Josh’s childhood encounters with the beyond? Or possibly a serial killer with a fondness for scaring from beyond the grave? The answer is “yes,” but those aren’t really the right questions. The right question is whether Wan can match or top the scares of the first Insidious. That’s also a “yes.”

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He’s become a master of making hoary elements feel fresh again, and here, he gets jars out of blinking lights, bodies covered in sheets like Halloween ghosts, off-key piano music, spooky old women, spooky younger women, toys, and other old-dark-house staples. Insidious: Chapter 2 reminds viewers why these elements were scary in the first place, and proves skillful filmmaking can breathe new life into the oldest ideas.

(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) The flaw at the core of these films (and, to a lesser extent, The Conjuring) is that they also feel a bit engineered. None have dispensable stories, and a coherent mythology is starting to take shape between the two Insidious chapters, but everything about both films feels like a setup, a way to put characters in creepy settings and push them toward screams. But that’s only a problem when the tricks stop feeling novel. And though Wan is stepping away from horror, at least for now, to direct the next The Fast And The Furious sequel, the latest Insidious entry suggests he’s a long way from running out of new tricks, or at least finding infinite variations on old ones.

(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) If we’ve learned anything from Wan’s two previous films, it’s that evil spirits haunt people, not houses. In the first “Insidious,” that imperiled party appeared to be young Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins), son of Josh (Wilson) and Renai (Byrne), who landed in a coma after being entreated into a spirit world known as “the further” by a demonic old hag intent on possessing his soul. Only, as a last-minute twist revealed, it was actually Josh himself who had been pursued by said demon for decades — and there was no guarantee she was gone just yet.

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Fittingly, “Chapter 2” (again scripted by longtime Wan collaborator Leigh Whannell) begins with an extended flashback to Josh’s own childhood and his first encounter with the hypnotist and medium Elise (Lin Shaye), who appeared to die at Josh’s strangling hands in the first film’s final moments. With this new piece of the puzzle in place, we jump back to the present, picking up (a la “Halloween II”) exactly where the previous pic left off.

(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) Looking to make a fresh start, the Lamberts have packed their bags and moved in with Josh’s mom, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey, getting a welcome expanded role this time), who lives in just the sort of draughty Victorian fixer-upper that allows Wan and Whannell’s imaginations to run wild. It quickly becomes apparent that the Lamberts have not arrived unaccompanied.

(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) If the first “Insidious” often felt like an affectionate hat-tip to “The Shining,” with its gifted child able to commune with the undead (via the nocturnal art of astral projection), “Chapter 2” continues the homage by having Wilson go full Jack Torrance on us, as the seemingly upstanding Josh starts to seem less and less himself, and possibly turning into something quite dangerous. That plus the appearance of some very unwanted house guests — like a ghoulish bride who gives Renai a good thrashing about the living room — prompt Lorraine to enlist some backup in the form of Elise’s erstwhile sidekicks, Specks (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson). Eventually joined by another blast from the past — the paranormal investigator Carl (a very good Steve Coulter), who first investigated the Lambert case with Elise all those years ago — further into the further they go.

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(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) Wan and Whannell once again spin a ripping good ghost story here, populated by lots of restless spirits who ended their time among the living badly, a mother only Norman Bates could love, and a lyrical bit of time travel borrowed from Proust. They’re terrific pastiche artists, freely raiding our collective storehouse of horror-movie memories and arranging them in fresh, unexpected ways. Even their own work is up for grabs, since “The Conjuring” in many ways resembled a period inversion of “Insidious,” with Wilson as ghost hunter rather than hunted. But where so many sequels seem like mere remakes of their predecessors, with bigger budgets and less imagination, “Insidious” Chapter 2” feels like a genuine continuation of characters we enjoyed getting to know the first time around, and wouldn’t at all mind returning to again.

(Download Insidious: Chapter 2) If Wan is better than most genre directors when it comes to actors, he’s even better with mysteriously possessed inanimate objects, bringing the audience’s neck hair to attention with each creaking doorjamb, swaying chandelier and squawking transistor radio. He understands the innately creepy value of antiques — objects that we know were quite literally touched by the dead — and anything associated with childhood, that other irrecoverable past. Here, that simplest feat of sandbox engineering, a tin-can telephone, becomes perhaps the movie’s most accursed object — and something of a metaphor for Wan’s joyously analog thrill-making in the digital era.

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