Horror movie sequels are a tricky thing to pull off. A lot of what horror movies do is utilize our fear of the unknown in order to give us a visceral moviegoing experience. They introduce a shadowy threat, establish its menace, and then slowly reveal more and more about it, building the tension of the danger that it brings to the table, until they finally reveal everything about it in a big, showy conclusion. Once the threat gets its big reveal, the bloom kind of comes off the rose though. You can’t stick it back in the shadows and try to slowly reveal it again. That would be stupid. So what you generally get in a horror movie sequel is a story that tries to keep your interest by going bigger, being more ridiculous, and ultimately getting more laughable.
James Wan seems to realize this, so with Insidious: Chapter 2 he has made a horror movie sequel that’s gleefully, unapologetically corny, funny, and grand. We pick up pretty much exactly where the first film left off, with Josh and Renai Lambert’s (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) miraculously revived from his supernatural coma, but with Josh now acting spookily possessed and murderous. This time around we combat an even more dangerous presence, explore even spookier haunted locations, confront even larger legions of terrorized apparitions, and all with added slapstick humor and self-referential silliness. If you go into the film expecting another moody, self-contained horror piece, you’re likely to be disappointed. But if, like Wan, you’re ready to have some fun with the loud, messy cracking open of the Insidious universe, then you’ll probably walk away feeling like you’ve been adequately entertained.
That’s not to say that there aren’t any scares here though. At this point in his horror career Wan has become something of a master at setting up scary situations, to the point where he makes it look easy. In his most recent film, The Conjuring, he set up a conceit where the haunted family often played a blindfolded game similar to Marco Polo in order to create extremely tense scenarios wherein they’d stumble into danger unknowingly, and here he keeps that momentum going with an early scene where a classic game of “you’re getting hotter/you’re getting colder” draws the tension of a dangerous situation out to the point where it’s almost unbearable, and then produces a big scare. Likely in his next movie he’ll find a way to make hopscotch scary.
The camerawork in his films has become expert at accentuating the spookiness of any given spooky situation as well. Insidious: Chapter 2 is full of deep focus shots that force your eyes to travel down lengthy hallways searching for a glimpse of the next threat. It’s full of slow pan ins that you know are going to eventually stop on something horrible. Their slow, deliberate advancement does quite a bit to accentuate your panic concerning what else horrible could possibly happen next. Wan has so much experience producing scares that he’d probably be able to film a McDonalds commercial that made you jump once or twice if he had to.
He takes his talent for setting a mood and building spooky sets and puts it into overdrive as well. You can tell that this is the sort of movie that’s going to milk the horror drama for all of its inherent fun from the very moment that the 80s-looking title sequence rolls, but that fact becomes even more clear once the action moves to a haunted, abandoned hospital later on. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that a hospital this expansive, this decrepit, and this packed with untouched, spooky artifacts would ever exist outside of a nuclear winter situation, but Wan plops it into the middle of his film anyway, and the effect is sort of the horror movie equivalent of the ultra-expensive, ultra-grandiose action sequences that have been closing out recent summer blockbusters. Insidious 2 is the Terminator 2 of horror movies.
One of the things that made the original Insidious stand out from the usual pack of horror films is that Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are stronger actors than the people who play the protagonists in them (though this may be a reality that’s finally seeing some change due to directors like Wan and Ti West doing regular horror work with good people), and their talent also helps out here. Wilson is doing more than just milking his persona in this one too. The story requires him to go big and ham it up with his performance, and it’s a lot of fun watching him do just that. It turns out he can go from deadpan to manic on a dime, and he’s got a bit of a rubber face as well. He should get more excuses to go big more often. Byrne, comparatively, gets less fun stuff to do, but she’s so perfect at playing the concerned mother in a haunted house story that she’s also strong in her role. Basically she’s just a pained face poking out of a flowing sweater at this point. Maybe she’ll get the chance to murder someone with an axe or something if she shows up in another one of these, and then we’ll get to see what she’s got as an onscreen nut job too. She deserves it.
Also, special mention should be made of Leigh Wannell and Angus Sampson and where their paranormal investigator characters go in this sequel. Seeing as they’re playing cartoon characters who are defined by glasses and a beard respectively, it always seemed like they should have been used as comic relief in the first film, and this sequel refuses to let that missed opportunity pass twice. Both of these guys have such strong comedic chops that they pull off being the bumbling boobs with no problem—even while working with fairly broad material—and they work to lighten the mood quite a bit. If you’re expecting Insidious: Chapter 2 to be another self-serious horror film, then their work might come off as being offensive or lame to you, but if you accept the movie for what it is, it’s impossible not to allow their performances to muster up a little bit of Scooby-Doo nostalgia. This movie puts the focus on fun, and creates quite a bit of it. A million more sequels, whether they’re directed by Wan or not, are likely.
That’s not to say that everything here is great though. There is a disappointment that comes from watching Wan go from a movie as classically scary as The Conjuring to one as over the top as this one. And the dialogue is unacceptably clunky in places as well. I mean, it isn’t just clunky, it’s also kind of senseless in places. There are points where a character will claim something and then contradict that claim in the next breath, so trying to keep up with everyone’s motivations can get downright confusing. If there’s one big detriment to the Insidious franchise, it’s that its setup involves other dimensions, astral projection, ghosts, and countless other conceits that just involve too much explaining, and occasionally all of the exposition trips over itself. Plus, there are some epically bad fake beards in this movie. Just, epically bad. How about in the next one we have the actors go ahead and grow real beards?
