Insidious Review

Rating: 4/5

When it comes to horror nowadays, it's usually bad. Horror films are always either remakes or sequels, and the rare original ones rely way too much on jump scares. For me, there is a huge difference between a surprising movie and a scary movie. For example, The Unborn is surprising, and Insidious is scary.

Renee and Josh (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson) have just moved into their new house with their three children. Things are off to a bad start when their oldest son, Dalton, falls into a coma. Three months later, Dalton is still unconscious, and scary stuff starts happening. The family tries to move away, but they start to think that the house isn't the problem.

As I said, what most horror movies are missing completely nowadays is atmosphere. When scares happen in films like Darkness Falls, all that happens is a loud noise and something pops out. In movies like The Ring, there's a buildup of a feeling of absolute dread. The feeling is necessary to have so that people are scared of what might happen rather than what they know will happen.

Insidious accomplishes this magnificently with dark scenery, great sound design, and the fact that we don't see the scary stuff for most of the movie. As a result, when the ghosts and demons haunting the main characters show up, we're more scared than if they just dragged people into the darkness every three seconds. Of course, there are silly scenes, especially once the psychic comes into the plot, but most of it works very well. Of course, without good acting it's all for naught, and all the leads do their job well.

Insidious does the job of proving that the Saw guys weren't only good at gore effects. This movie proves that they can sculpt real terror in their audience, and do it well. Next time you want to be scared, go see Insidious. It's a lot of fun.