Even scared a jaded movie veteran like me!

Rating: 8/10 (14 February 2014)

I've been watching horror movies for years and not much scares me anymore, so I was delighted to finally reconnect with that primal uneasiness I used to experience.
Insidious genuinely scared me. I'm glad I watched it during the day on DVD. I actually paused the movie to let my jangled nerves settle down.
What this movie did well was to build tension and then zap me. It was like walking around the house in socks on a dry winter day. You know the static is building up. You know you're going to get shocked when you touch metal. You anticipate it, and when that zap happens the anticipation adds to the pain. This movie did a lot of zapping! In the horror genre it's hard to be completely original. Here we have another family being haunted. A child is in danger. The mother is the first to believe. The father is skeptical. An old lady expert is called in to fix the problem. There's really nothing new there.
This movie wins with execution. It's the right pace of storytelling. It's the right sound editing. It's believable acting (for the most part). It's the right look for the otherworldly beings.
Don't expect perfection, though. Once they knew what the problem was, the way they set about resolving it took me out of the mood set during the first part of the movie. Eyes were rolled. Nevertheless, the overall experience left me with a lingering sense of unease.
I'm glad someone figured out how to put this all together. I've been waiting years to feel this way again. Well done!