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.
