Speaking of scary…

It’s been a good week for scary movies. After my review of Orphan yesterday, today I’m going to run through another film that managed to scare the bejeezus out of me…Insidious.

Let me start out by saying that I enjoy being scared by a good horror movie, and therefore end up watching loads of them. The drawback of this is that because I watch so many, I have become somewhat desensitised and now hate it when lazy film makers fall back on cliché and convention. If you’re lucky enough to be making movies for a living a least put some effort in!

And then something like Insidious comes along. From the makers of Paranormal Activity, the film revolves around parents Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson who move their children into a new home only for their eldest child to be struck down and fall into a coma whilst exploring the loft. Then when they relocated their unconscious son back to their house, strange things start to happen…

It’s great when a film can scare you, and nowadays it can only do that if it does something original. Whilst the main storyline does play into the cinematic conventions of previous films, the originality here comes from the where the scares are placed, thus the conventional becomes unconventional. What subverts the genre is despite some resistance, the husband is much more accepting of the fact that there are strange things going on (unlike the annoying cliché of the husband refusing to believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence).

Borrow strongly from Poltergeist there’s a real sense of the house turning on the family, and there’s even an older psychic lady joining the fray (played by Magda from There’s Something About Mary), but again part of the reason this works is that they take the plot away from the expected instead guiding it down a route that’s much harder to predict.

There are a couple of genuinely frightening moments that will make you jump (unless you’ve got the constitution of a gargoyle) and much like Orphan the reason it worked for me is the use of implied menace rather than turning the film into a gore fest. It’s ultimately just a really well made horror movie that I can’t recommend enough to fright-fiends.

All in all, definitely one for horror fanatics and not one for the feint hearted. You have been warned…