Insidiously scary

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2012)

I sat down to watch this movie INSIDIOUS with mixed feelings. I love horror films nut recently Hollywood, has been churning out thrash in this genre with few notable exceptions like THE DESCENT. Even the much over hyped PARANORMAL ACTIVITY seemed to me to be a boring experiment in cinematography.
Then a film like INSIDIOUS comes along to breath a fresh air into the genre and revitalized a story telling style of haunted homes that is reminiscent of the old horror movies.
Its greatest strength perhaps is that it does not rely on gore, surprising considering that the director is James Wan who made his directorial mark in the hyper bloody and extremely gory SAW. Script writer Leigh Whannel creates a story about a family that moves into a cute old fashioned house to begin a new life. Soon, odd things, spectacles, noises, begin to occur which makes Renai Lambert, the matriarch start to suspect that the house is haunted. Suspicion becomes conviction after her son falls inexplicably into coma. Faced with baffled doctors and a semi-skeptical husband, she is forced to force the truth of the horror that her family is about to face.
Anyone with even a passive interest in horror will see the clichés in INSIDIOUS. The afflicted child, the haunted house, the distraught mother (not the father), the hair rising music. We have seen them all in such movies like THE EXORCIST, THE UNBORN, HAUNTED, etc.
But in INSIDIOUS, the clichés are refreshingly told with a simplicity and a style that makes you hooked right from the spooky credits (again reminiscent of old movies style) to the heart stopping conclusion. And unlike in other horror movies, halfway through the movie, the couple decides to do the most sensible thing a family will do in real life if confronted with an inexplicable evil in their own house instead of waiting till all the family members are killed.
Both the director and the writer deserve a lot of credit for this outstanding horror piece. Rose Byrne was good as the distraught mother who would believe anything to save the son's life. So was Patrick Wilson who at first is hesitant in accepting a supernatural explanation for what was happening to their son. Their acting was not really outstanding but still good enough to support a low budget horror movie. (It had a reportedly budget of $1.5m and grossed over $50). Great scary movie.