Jerik Hendrickson

Insidious

Recently I saw the latest horror movie, Insidious, being touted as “the scariest movie since Poltergeist!” As an abused lover of the horror genre, I went.  As the credits began to roll I thought to myself, “What an aptly named movie.”  The trailer and first half of the movie leads you to believe you’re getting one thing, when all of the sudden — BOOM.  You realize you’re not really getting what you thought you were.  The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I became with the horror genre in general.  “Why am I always let down!” I thought.  I’d never really sat back and looked at the matter.

Let’s start with the Insidious trailer:

I saw that and thought, “Nice!  A new horror movie!  Creepy shit in a house!  Let’s do this!” which I always seem to do.  As I said, I love the genre, although I feel disappointed by it pretty consistently.  There are definitely several diamonds in the rough, but horror movies (at least as of the last decade or so) always seem to have one or a handful of effective scares before they take the movie in a different, and often silly, direction.  Almost like the writers were like “Well, all this crazy shit happened…we…we’ve got to do something to make it all better!”

Take 2008’s The Strangers for instance.  I liked this one, but I feel like they topped themselves very early in the movie with one scene, most of which is in the trailer.  Here’s the trailer, the scene I’m referring to is at the :45 mark.

From then on the movie is a continuation of a there-in-one-shot-gone-in-the-next, scary-noises-in-the-other-room routine that is utilized so much it just becomes expected every time you see one of the villains.  The thrill is gone.  What I did like, however, was the writers of the movie didn’t explain everything away and give us a nice happy ending.  The villains in the movie don’t have some birdbrained reason for doing what they do.  They’re just fucked up.  I like this concept.  It’s scarier than some silly “Well, the husband has a backstory where he made someone mad once years ago” or “So-and-so’s mother belonged to a witch cult and they’ve come back to get her first born” explanation.  It’s why the Halloween franchise was cool.  Michael Meyers was basically just crazy. 

I could give a bunch of other examples and rant much more but this is ultimately about Insidious. 

The first portion of the movie had me very hopeful.  There are some very creepy, fucked up parts.  As expected, creepy shit is happening in a house.  They can’t explain it.  What bothered me was the way the male character refused to believe the main female character, who was the one experiencing most of the unexplainable stuff.  “Nothing’s wrong!”  God knows we’ve never seen that anywhere in the last ten years.  Nope.  Nowhere.  If that was overused elsewhere, why would they put that in yet another movie?  We all know that you can love and know someone for years when suddenly they start seeing things and/or lying about crazy happenings.  For no reason.  Yeah.  That’s what happens.  In real life.  Ever.

Things were still going relatively ok, but as soon as the main male character’s mother said “I know someone who can help.” I thought “Oh shit.  This is where it goes downhill.” and I was right.  The movie just became a kind of silly astral projection version of Poltergeist.  Full of cliches (“Well, there is one other thing we can do…but it’s dangerous”) and basically devoid of the creepy scares that the first part of the movie had.  The gross old lady from Kingpin was the Zelda Rubinstein of this movie, trying to get back the main characters’ child from a non-existent-in-real-life spirit world.  It all became too much.  There’s nothing scary about a non-existent-in-real-life spirit world.  Where’s the creepy stuff?  Give me my creepy stuff!!!  The male character’s mother was a good friend of the gross Kingpin lady, which immediately made me think “I bet some similar shit happened to the male character when he was a kid and he doesn’t remember it!”  Spoiler alert:  I’m not a genius - that shit was just predictable.

It wasn’t a total bummer, it just failed to meet the expectations I had for it, which seems to generally be the case when I see a horror movie.  I know I’m not going to be getting The Shining or anything, but for fucksakes scare me!  I don’t want to know about spirit realms.  I don’t want to know why a ghost wants to scare the characters.  Just make it scare them, and make it be awesome, and I’ll go home and feel just a little uneasy about moving around in the dark.

Which basically means I’m satisfied.