Insidious

How could anything bad happen to such a nice looking family?

Within the horror genre, there are sub genres.  The Saw films are gore porn.  The Scream movies are bloody murder mysteries.  Neither series is about frights as much as they are about body counts.  Very few horror films actually scare.  Insidious is a shivering exception.

Like so many of its genre, it starts with a family moving into a new home.  Things get misplaced and moved about.  They start to hear noises, and almost always at night.  After seeing specters, they get scared enough and move, but the haunting continues. One of their sons, Dalton, slips into a coma at night, and never wakes up.  He is essentially asleep for months in their home as a visiting nurse changes his breathing and feeding tubes.

One day Josh's mother pays them a visit and tells them about a dream she had.  "I went into Dalton's room... there was something in there with him. It was standing in the corner. I asked it, "who are you?" It said "a visitor." I then asked it, "what do you want?" It said Dalton."   

Luckily Grandma knows a psychic who can help.  She is an elderly woman who arrives with her two techno nerds and explains it all quite easily.  It seems Dalton has been sending his astral self out at night, while he sleeps.  He has done it often thinking he was dreaming.   This last time, his astral projection got lost.  Now spirits and a demon, want to posses his abandoned body.

All of that Dungeon and Dragon playing as a teenager is still paying off.  My 17 year old had no idea what the psychic was talking about, but anyone who owned The Players Manual knew what Dalton had done.  With the spirits and demon trying to get into Dalton, the parents and the psychic must do battle with the beings from beyond.   A last minute reveal from grandma and some clues left by Dalton may help.

Insidious has a small body count, and not much blood, but plenty of jump out of your seat moments.  Probably because I had no idea what to expect, I elbowed my seventeen year old son several times in reaction to something on screen.  As jaded as he is, he still thought it was one of the scariest films he has ever seen.  The ending is of course left open for a sequel.  Do film companies demand that in contracts?