Hands down one of the best horror films in a long time.

Rating: Null/10 (6 October 2011)

{Spoiler at very bottom, will be labelled as such}
It takes quite a bit for me to actually consider a movie scary, or even creepy. Very few horror movies I consider truly scary. The only movies that I can think of off the top of my head that I actually found frightening were Event Horizon (keep in mind I was 11 when I saw it). The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and The Ring. Anything else I found to be boring, a rip off of something else, or at very least an entertaining film but not scary. The main problem is that most modern horror movies feel that they have to have something scary happen in pretty much EVERY scene. It gets so tedious and takes no time to build up tension. Then of course there's films like the Saw series who think gore is scary. It's not scary, it's disgusting and uninteresting.
Then along came Insidious. I chose to skip seeing it in the theatre when I heard that James Wan (director of the first Saw) was helming the project. (that being said I did think Dead Silence another one of his movies was pretty creepy) But I decided I hadn't seen any ghost movies in a while and the worst thing that could happen was that I would get a laugh out of it. So I picked the movie up on blu-ray cheap and watched it that night. Boy was I glad I did. This film did everything right. Went against pretty much every clichÃ© (I know writer Leigh Wannell said he had a list of horror clichÃ©s so he could avoid using them). The pacing, atmosphere, timing of scares was all perfect. Also there was a significant amount of showing us lots of stuff, but not really SHOWING us which I thought worked amazing.
My only issue was...SPOILER BELOW:
The need for a downer, open-ended finale. I'm okay with ambiguous endings but when a family has more or less literally gone through hell, I'm okay with a happy ending. But that's me.