cafenowhere

The other night I noticed that Netflix has Insidious: The Red Door available and I'm still searching for horror movies, so I considered watching it. The only thing was, I couldn't remember if I'd seen the first Insidious and I didn't want to watch a sequel if I didn't remember the original. So I looked up the movie and realized I'd been mistaking Insidious, which I'd never watched, for Sinister, another one-word-title horror movie. I remember Sinister well, except for it's name apparently, because it starred Ethan Hawke as a writer (as imagined by Hollywood, so completely unrealistic) and the kills were...unlikely, I'll say.

While figuring this out, I realized that The Red Door is the FOURTH movie in a franchise. The second Insidious movie picks up right where the first one leaves off (with Jenna Ortega in a tiny role; that girl is in all the horror movies lately VIVA LA RAZA!). The third film seems to abandon the original characters while keeping the general premise. And the fourth film returns to (at least some of) the original characters. Of course, I could not start with the FOURTH movie in a franchise, so I watched both one and two. The cast includes two ghost hunter types in addition to a medium. I cannot stand ghost hunting tv shows and these guys were definitely in that mold, rather than modeled after, say, the paranormal investigators in Poltergeist or, ten years earlier, The Haunting of Hell House. The only ghost hunters I have any chill for are the Ghostfacers in Supernatural, who proved "Gay love can pierce through the veil of death and save the day."

There are some nice callbacks to the original in the second Insidious. It makes sense that this installment is called Chapter 2. But I'm unsure that those moments of "oh, that's what was happening" are enough to offset the extremely tedious nature of the sequel. There's flashbacks and recaps to orient the new viewer, but ***SPOILERS FOR  A 13-YEAR-OLD MOVIE***there's also a duality to the original--what happened to the son also happened to the father when he was a child--that feels stretched too thin for a whole 'nother movie. To verve it up, a serial killer is tossed into the mix, which gives the characters an excuse to explore an abandoned hospital and a different haunted house.

That was something interesting to me--all these haunted houses were multi-story, forcing characters to run up and down the stairs to check on children or investigate ghostly activities. It's unclear how the family of five, relying solely on the father's salary as a public school teacher, could even afford such houses. (Or how two single mothers, each with a single child, both ended up in mansions.) So many floors, so many doors, so many hiding places. That makes for a good horror movie--all the built-in jump scares--but it also makes me wonder why in so many movies, being haunted is an affliction of the affluent, who are presented as being middle class. It's like punishment: "What do you expect, with all those rooms?" There's also a suggestion of history in these big houses, but for the main family at the heart of the story, the ghosts are "imported", not linked to the house itself. So it's other people's history that haunts. It reminds me of what Dr. Kinitra Brooks said at Sirens in 2021 about how the flood of Evil Character redemptions arcs trends alongside white guilt.

Watching the preview of Insidious: The Red Door that plays when one's  noodling around Netflix gives me the impression that this sequel also relies on a lot of retelling. Frankly I'm not invested enough to continue the Insidious marathon.