When a good horror forgets its own plot

Rating: 6/10 (6 June 2011)

For Insidious they took a really good movie and half way through lost the plot and stuck a different movie on the end. The first half and the second just didn't match, they would have made two different films but together they'll didn't blend well and it fell into the American trap of showing too much and completely nullifying the scare factor. Let's talk about the good, the film starts using classic horror scoring even the font for the title is old styled. It's like watching the horror films of the 1930's imagine the font and music of Nosferatu. This older scoring makes for a classic eerie atmosphere, it's an unnatural music with sharp sounds great for creating an unfamiliar and unsettled environment. It really works in the films favour as it does make this house feel haunted and creepy; you don't trust it and you already feel like something bad is in the house. Now the first half sets up the haunting and some of the things you need for a horror film. We have an imposing house that already feels ominous; the camera angles also make the house seem unfriendly giving us unusual views of the staircase and shoots of locked doors. Add to the mix the young family, new home 3 young children one still an infant in the crib, a new job, the pressure of motherhood and working from home, an unfamiliar area and the isolation you get as an adult when you move to a new area and only have each other. This all leads to added anxiety for the characters and us as the audience who begin to emphasize with their growing concern and apprehension about their new life. So everything is set up nicely for a good horror film as the characters are already under a lot of pressure which makes for a nice tense atmosphere to add a haunting. And this they do well with a subtle build-up of books moving but no one see's how or when, a strange voice on the baby monitor and some really good jumps. I was well on my way to feeling truly unsettle and had given myself a heart attack at the jumps. I soon started hiding behind my hand and decided that this film was a bad idea because I was freaked out. This is a great example of a haunted house film coupled with the growing anxiety of these parents. Before long one of the sons is lured into the attic another source of fear and has a fall, next day he is in a coma. We don't know the reasons and soon its 3 months later, mother is getting more and more freaked out in her home and father is spending more time away from home unable to help his wife. Things begin to come to a head as it becomes apparent that something in the house wants our comatose youth and its getting closer so our mother finally convinces her husband to move house. As soon as we get into the new house the wife starts seeing ghosts which are a little too real looking for me. This is where the great atmosphere of the first half is ruined and the film takes things too far. Here's where the film goes bad and wrong. They call in the Ghostfacers (if you've seen the show Supernatural you'll know what I mean) they act like the comedy double act of the ghost hunting world and while its works for a little while, you are lulled into a false sense of security by the comedy and then something jumps out at you, it goes too far and then they call in the exorcist. Now it all goes wrong, OK the exorcist seeing that it's a demon haunting the son trying to steal his body that's fine but it just didn't work. We get all the back story and a stupid plot about astro-projection and our little boy lost in a place called the Farther, his soul is lost and now ghosts are trying to take his body and worse than that this demon. It turns out that good old dad was an astro-projector and when he was young a creepy old women stalked him getting closer (as revealed in a selection of secret photo's his mum kept). Somehow creepy woman didn't run off with his body, dad has forgotten this and now it's up to him to remember his power and project into this nightmare world to save his son and escape the demon. It just gets plan silly now, old woman exorcist puts on a gas mask with a weird trunk and does some odd séance that looks ridicules. And then Darth Maul appears, I'm not even joking you see his face once in the normal world and I jumped like crazy but then we meet him in crazy ghost world he's fully revealed and just not scary if you've seen the recent Star Wars movies. The astro Farther scene just plays out too much we explore all these ghosts that we know nothing about, they're not needed it just bulks out a storyline that is running away with itself. Then we enter an area that looks like the VIP area of a night club mixed with the Phantom of the Opera's lair. Just to make things weird we see that Darth Maul is a bit of a carnival fan, loves an old record spinning on a classic turn table does Darth Maul. By now we've seen the big bad in all its glory the film is pretty much over for me as its way to obvious and just not scary watching this CGI demon chase our characters around the place trying to get back to their bodies. The film does try to have a quirky twist, one that they flash back to about 5mins after we saw it, but it's just not enough to save a failed second half.