Heavily Overrated as far as scares go

Rating: 5/10 (10 December 2011)

Insidious was one of those movies I heard everyone talking about saying, "So scary!" or "Scariest movie I have ever seen!" even someone who claimed they were a horror film fanatic had this movie over the exorcist! I can tell you that this movie is not scary... at least to me. But it is jumpy.
I think audiences now a days do not know the difference between horror and terror. According to Devendra Varma in The Gothic Flame (1966): The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.
Insidious is full of "horror" but it uses a LOT of jump scares. This movie is very jumpy, and uses cheap scares about every second. The only problem is that you can tell when a jump scare is going to happen except for about two scenes. I will admit there are some good concepts in this movie and the good ideas start to fold at the end of the movie, but the beginning of the movie just isn't so good. The movie uses the loud violin screeches way too much. Really the violin is so loud in this movie that you can't hear anything else.
The plot follows a family in what is seemingly a haunted house after their son goes into a coma after falling from a ladder.. Creepy noises, bloody hand prints, and other strange stuff occur. They leave the house and move, but even stranger stuff occurs. It ends up that the kid is actually trying to be possessed by many demons/spirits and the same time. There isn't a real main bad monster, or bad guy, but there is one that appears frequently and looks like Darth Maul meets Freddy Kruger.
I will admit that the red faced demon is pretty sweet looking, and hearing tip toe through the tulips was great! I actually sang to it really loud while watching the movie since I know the song well. I guess for some people the song made the movie scarier, but for me it made it lighter.
The movie has some LOL moments where the dialog is just dreadful, but that is mainly during the first half of the movie. The second half has much better acting and dialog. Scary scenes were ruined by some bad dialog.
Overall the movie tried something interesting but kind of failed in having genuine terror.