No it's insipid

Rating: 6/10 (15 November 2011)

I suggest that, if you choose to watch Insidious, that you also check out the Horror 101 that is a special feature on the DVD. It is about 10 minutes long containing interview footage of the film's creators discussing the film's background. You will see they are woefully in need of their own Horror 101 to sit through.
OK, basic plot outline, a married couple with 3 kids, two boys about 9 years old and a baby girl, move into a "creepy" new old house. There are plenty of floor creaks and the other usual trappings to make you think the house is haunted. One boy has an accident in the house, goes into an unexplainable coma, and while in the coma, weird things happen in that house as well as the new house the wife forces the husband to move them to. So, we at last are told it is not a haunted house or even two haunted houses, but rather a case of "astral projection" gone wrong. If you are not familiar with the concept, projection involves a sleeper whose soul can leave the body, at will and normally controlled by the mind, and wanders through the astral plane or wherever. The boy wanders too far and too long and eventually becomes lost, thereby leaving his physical form as an inviting new home for other lost souls or even demons. A seance is held and so on.
Oddly enough, as I was killing this movie mentally by noting all the other films this movie borrowed from, I found myself unnerved by the non-supernatural aspects of the movie. Hearing a voice in the baby monitor, real or imagined, would be scary, but it's not a new idea. And having the home alarm go off and front door open, plus the knocking at the door, would be something that'd scare me, but it doesn't have to have a supernatural force behind it. IMDb lists about a dozen films that already deal with astral projection, so for the film makers to say they didn't think this topic had been covered before is, well, pretty typical for today's moronic young horror director.
The film House from the 80's stood out in my mind the most as I watched this. If you haven't seen that, a father loses his son in an old house and goes between worlds, meeting ghosts and demons, in order to find and free him to bring him home, where they are followed into the physical world by someone(something) who knew the father earlier in life. Sound familiar? Yes, it does. Do yourself a solid and watch House instead. House had an intense impact on me as a kid, influencing much of my artwork at the time. It's not necessarily scary but far more enjoyable than Insidious. Even the repeated moving camera outside the house at night was right out of House.
This is exactly the sort of film I'd expect from the creators for Saw and Paranormal Activity. Except for an F-Bomb, this could have been a TV-movie or a decent addition to Goosebumps. I felt like I was watching a professionally made real film version of Paranormal Activity, another film I could do without.
The film stock looked cheap, almost made-for-cable and reminiscent of those Haunting shows, as if I wasn't watching a film, but a re-creation by "actors" who couldn't get a job doing anything real, repeating the lines of a story that supposedly happened to someone else.
And, just like with Paranormal Activity, I didn't care about the family because they didn't act like real people. I'm sorry, but you don't get your butt whipped by some devils in a seance then just go downstairs and chat about it. I normally don't boycott horror film directors or writers, but in this case, they have forced my hand. I will never watch anything by this "director" again.