Insidious: Chapter 3

Possibly watching this after a few artsy horror flicks wasn’t the most charitable thing to do. It was never going to be anything but a piece of fluff, and judging by box office numbers for the likes of The Witch and Hereditary, this is the sort of thing mass audiences want. Not very scary, but with a few little jump scares with ridiculous string section blasts to tell you what you’re meant to think, and then you can laugh and cuddle up to your partner a little more and feel good. This sort of by-the-numbers horror is to horror what The Big Bang Theory is to comedy. Nothing wrong with it, it’s enjoyable to watch and it does what it’s meant to do, but plays it totally safe, follows a formula and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

From Poltergeist to The Conjuring, and quite possibly back to The Exorcist, it’s pretty obvious with these sorts of supernatural films that the interesting people to follow tend to be the exorcists themselves. The often very quirky individuals who show up after all the normal family’s problems have reached a climax point and teach them how to fight back. And that’s true for Insidious, too – I cared a lot more about the funny older lady with the power to look into ‘The Further’ than about the dad of the family who was ostensibly the central figure of the first two films. So this prequel shows her in action again. Not revealing much about her past – it looks like that was saved for the recently-released Insidious 4 – but showing a case from her past and, a little unconvincingly, how she got her team together.

This film is noticeably more ropey than the last two. The family that gets haunted are very wooden, there’s quite a bit of awkward cutting to make it look like a 70-year-old woman is getting violently thrown around. As usual, the things the ghosts do are arbitrary and based more on building up audience tension than actually making any sort of internally consistent sense. Many of the supposedly creepy moments are more comical, as are the times Elise steels her spiritual power to become a badass and fight back. Meanwhile, there’s nothing whatsoever funny about the supposed comic relief guys.

But frankly I don’t watch Insidious 3 expecting anything different from this. So in what it sets out to do, it succeeds. I doubt I’ll remember the details of the story next year, though, never mind in 5.