Insidious: Out of the Further - The sixth Insidious entry delivers the most engaging experience yet

Insidious has grown to be one of the most dependable modern horror franchises. While no entry has reached the pantheon of modern horror classics, this series has remained good old-fashioned supernatural fun, the rare PG-13 horror series that doesn’t feel like it’s being held back for mass appeal. The brainchild of Saw director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, the two put their heads together for a movie that could not be less like John Kramer’s blood-soaked quest to make people appreciate their lives. 

While at first the 2010 original seemed like a retread of familiar territory (namely Poltergeist), it laid its own groundwork in a few ways: The house isn’t haunted, but a person. That person’s consciousness is stuck in an otherworld called The Further, a place where the souls of wicked humans dwell, hoping they can take the place of a poor soul capable of drifting into their realm. The real secret weapon, however, is the great Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier, a kind but tough spirit medium who has history with The Further. Alongside her ghost-hunting partners Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), Elise (despite not surviving the first movie, a problem easily solved by prequels and the realm of the metaphysical) became the common element in all of these movies, sometimes the main character and sometimes relegated to a brief but key appearance. Other main cast members such as Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne come and go as the series needs them.

The first two movies and 2023’s The Red Door focus on Wilson’s Josh Lambert and his haunted family, leaving the other entries, Chapter 3 and The Last Key as what X-Files fans might call “monster of the week” episodes, movies that focus more on Elise’s history and the kind of lore drops on both her and the entities in The Further that obsessive horror fans love to devour. In Insidious: Out of the Further, the Lambert family is nowhere to be found, save for a brief reference to the seminal film. From relatively unknown writer/director Jacob Chase, this is a new family in a new place with a wicked new problem, and it just might be the high point of the series so far.
Gemma (Amelia Eve) is a dental hygienist with a troubled past. As a child she watched her mother bash her own head into the bathroom wall until there was nothing left behind her eyes, and as an adult she lives in the same house where it happened. Now a single mother herself, she lives in fear of giving her daughter Maya (Island Austin) the same kind of traumatic childhood that she had, despite refusing to part with a single item that belonged to her mother (now all boxed in the garage), much less the house itself. Despite the horror that happened in 1999, 20 years later the house sits in the very picture of suburbia. Gemma has a good job, she is friendly with her neighbors, she has an uncommonly nice cop boyfriend named Nick (Brandon Perea), and 2020 hasn’t ruined the whole trajectory of modern history for an entire generation just yet. She keeps seeing three strange elderly people in the neighborhood though, and her nightmares have been more real and more vivid. One member of this trio even comes to her dental office for a cleaning (one of the more disgusting scenes to ever get away with a PG-13 rating), and after extracting all manner of filth from his rotting teeth, a second pair of teeth inside his mouth slams shut on her. One night she drifts into a nightmare, crawling into Maya’s pillow fort as it becomes a labyrinth with ghoulish figures lurking around every corner. One long-haired figure, eventually identified as Cyrus (Sam Spruell) keeps appearing and talking to Gemma, clearly wanting something from her as he tries to pull her deeper into The Further.
Unfortunately for this clearly evil figure, one with a thankfully less silly name than previous Insidious villains like Lipstick-Face Demon and Keyface (clearly first drafts that nobody bothered to change), The Further has one pure soul wandering it for eternity: Elise is still here and she’s ready to kick ass. After saving Gemma in The Further, Elise sends her to Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), a tattoo artist and medium who can more safely convey Elise’s knowledge by acting as a conduit, and it’s not good. Cyrus has a bit of a following, and he’s managed to figure out that – thanks to Gemma and Maya having hereditary sensitivities to The Further – he can use them to bring all his fiendish pals into the real world, aided by the aforementioned evil elderly trio. Our heroes hatch a plan to stop him before they can flood the world with evil, but can they stop him in time? And can Gemma make peace with her mother’s traumatic passing?

Insidious has never been a series interested in conveying wholly original ideas, but rather expounding on familiar tales in a new way. As the initial entry evoked Tobe Hooper’s spectral classic, this borrows from a more unexpected inspiration in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, both stories of an evil soul trying to get from a dream world into the world of the living. There are also shades of Weapons, a bit of Raimi-esque goop, and even a raucous house-shaking climax reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! without any of the disturbing imagery of that biblical nightmare. Instead of feeling derivative though, these elements all combine to make the most compelling entry of this average-to-good series so far, the first in the series to border on great. The cast of mostly unknowns is surprisingly good (especially Spruell as the deliciously evil and very talkative Cyrus), the series’ familiar screeching strings are accompanied by a score that incorporates a very John Carpenter-esque minimalist synth sound. And with a larger scale and way bigger stakes, it feels like there is so much more going on compared to the previous entry, which felt more quaint all around. The main throughline for Insidious is that all of these movies are about families in crisis. While the trauma metaphor isn’t laid on as thick as it is in many other “elevated” (a term society seems ready to leave behind) horror films, these movies live and die on the family drama, and Out of the Further slickly manages to keep the drama relevant while letting the horror be fun.
It’s worth noting that in 2013, the same year as Insidious: Chapter Two, James Wan directed both that film and The Conjuring, a title that quickly overtook this series as a cultural juggernaut, filled with sequels, spinoffs, and sequels/prequels to spinoffs. Both starred the always-dependable Patrick Wilson, teamed with Vera Farmiga, and while the initial two entries in that series are solid, the wildly uneven side stories and later entries hurt them. Not to mention the lionization of true scoundrels like Ed and Lorraine Warren leaving a really bad taste in my mouth, no matter how captivating Wilson and Farmiga are. Insidious has stayed more low-key, having no complicated ties to reality as a new entry releases every few years and quietly makes back its budget tenfold. The secret weapon, and reason I think this is the superior series, has always been the wonderful Lin Shaye.
Sister of famed New Line Cinema founder Robert Shaye, she won the hearts of audiences over decades, starting with bit parts all across the ’80s, leading to unforgettable, scene-stealing comedic performances in the films of the Farrelly Brothers in the ’90s (and a personal favorite, Detroit Rock City), until eventually becoming a horror icon (as well as having regular cameos in New Line productions) right through this very day. It can not be overstated how important and cool it is that, in a day and age where Hollywood considers women to have an expiration date for screen presence, and usually a much earlier one than men, a woman in her eighties is anchoring a franchise that has been running for 16 years and six entries. While a lot of modern horror uses women of her age in often thankless (not you, Aunt Gladys) hag roles, Elise Rainier gets to be cool, dignified, and always the smartest person in the room – even if nobody can see that she’s in the room. Insidious: Out of the Further is that rare sixth entry in a horror franchise that happens to be the best (good company alongside Jason Lives), Lin Shaye is a national treasure, and I hope to see her slapping evil spirits in the face and calling them a bitch for another 20+ years.

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