Horror is having a moment right now. Ambitious, idea-infused Zillennials are able to have their way with our cultural consciousness and reshape the way we’ve been thinking about going to the movies. But it seems for every creepypasta-turned-blockbuster or gnarly, record-breaking re-invention of the Cinderella story, the decade-spanning titans of the genre are falling flat on their faces, busting up their established legacies if only to appear resultingly forlorn and fractured.
Insidious: Out of the Further is the (somehow) sixth film in the once-zealous brainchild of horror legends James Wan and Leigh Whannell, now both serving as producers. Largely ejecting itself from the Lambert family nightmare it became hog-tied to, the franchise is back with a soft-reset legacy sequel despite only having its last installment three years ago. Perhaps that oneiric and outstretched continuity had found itself as trite or forgotten by the studios as it became to the fans, and instead a new acolyte had to be chosen to carry a brand verging on dormancy out of its sleep – because money, of course!
Charting the life of an ancestrally traumatised Gemma (Amelia Eve) and her curiously oblivious daughter Maya (Island Austin), Out of the Further naturally strangles out of its narratively closed concept a reason to turn the knobs on the ominous red doors again. Gemma becomes haunted in her sleep by visitations from the minions of the demon Cyrus: a resident of the Further who vies to use Gemma’s worn-down weakness and unconscience as a hitchhike back to the land of the living.
The power to ‘courier’ things to and from the Further – the all-too-explained limbo between life and death, and the dimensional excuse to force another ‘trauma exercised as horror metaphor’ movie into unwelcome existence – is passed genetically onto her, meaning she could become the able-bodied MacGuffin to serve as the underworld’s destined jailbreaker (or, ideally, my ticket to escape out of this movie an hour early).
Gemma receives ghastly nightmares courtesy of the Further’s Inception-adjacent invasions of her subconscious, all led by a festeringly creepy cabal of geriatric, astral-projecting devil-worshippers hypnotised under the promise to cheat death, living on to frolick through the fields of the lands between forevermore – after they essentially resurrect the hypothetical child of Satan and Freddy Krueger, anyway. They delve into dreams through some sort of CPAP machine that sadly does not extend to the audience (possibly in 4DX, though I wouldn’t count on it) and allows escape to the only realm that lends Out of the Further any merit, though one still firmly within boredom’s ugly spectre.
For a franchise still proudly blaring the sirens of its logo’s crimson inverted “SI” as part of the stunting and inexplicably daft tagline “INSIDIOUS IS INSIDIOUS”, it’s terribly ironic that this one is unable to leave any mark. Its scariest components come in a crusty acolyte’s frightfully squeamish dental hygiene, or the terrifyingly banal and soporific depiction of a typical horror in the American suburbs: a street named after a tree, a dog named Radar, and the most obviously haunted detached house you’ve ever seen.
Scares carry no weight in a world where the slasher-esque onslaught is conducted only under quilts or within psychological domains immune to any real consequence, disrupted further as the main character and her surrounding circle are ingredients in the devil’s recipe, and thus needed alive. What results is a droning demonstration of creative bankrupcy about as bloody as removing a hangnail, and especially so when the narrative transformation between halves turns this admittedly almost-spooky rollercoaster ride into an incapable, Death Note-type psychological battle to prevent Earth from being overrun with more undead and returning lipstick-faced freaks than Zack Snyder’s Romero-riff from 2004.
That first half – ignoring the cold, or rather rainy, open that achieves nothing beyond prophesising later developments and introducing us to the storied Hall family home – is able to briefly excite in lieu of what’s to come after. Sinister, nail-biting setpieces (assuming the trailer didn’t completely pull their punch for you; modern movies, I guess!) prey on the infinite possibilities of a Further-wrought dreamscape to facilitate, if just for mere moments, some genuine popcorn-dropping distress, or cowering behind the hands.
Being subsumed into an boundless pillow fort larger than the 30,000 square-foot practical Backrooms set, or tormented by the world’s creepiest repeat-after-me toy, is what allows Jacob Chase’s hellish directorial vision for the capabilities of the Further to gain haste, operating in tandem with Dave Carbett’s (Evil Dead Rise) penchant for claustrophobic, deathly grey (the first time dull colour grading has ever been complimentary) cinematography. Edits are at times sharp, and performances are capable even when burgeoning from a mostly lifeless script, though all attempt illicits a capacity for fright that is met only with cheap, useless jumpscares or ridiculous franchise-fulfilling contrivances that turn Insidious’s try at a fresh start into nothing but a cracked mirror onlooking its former glory of 16 years ago.
Maybe Insidious didn’t need to unleash the Further and its new, apparently long-sealed, demon god onto us again. Some doors are best when they’re left shut, and if the only memorable result of one’s re-opening is a creepy old dude’s halitosis, I’d rather keep things closed until something more worthy of the franchise’s lingeringly frightful reputation is unleashed. Instead, we’re visited by a strand-attempting, legacy-light (though unfortunately not entirely bare) sequel that squashes all effort of closure made by its ancestors for the sake of a movie that I would rather have experienced in a dream. At least then I’d already be sleeping.
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