Catching up with Insidious, horror's most unfairly forgotten franchise

They have similar names and they’re both about dads, but Sinister is the one about a demon that lives in scary home movies and Insidious is the one about a dimension of demons that are all trying to escape into the real world. There are also only two Sinister movies and there are a bunch of Insidious movies, so if you see a horror movie you don’t immediately recognize that has demons and a dad, assume it’s an Insidious and not a Sinister. Horses, not zebras, as a doctor might say.

Insidious director James Wan got his start in feature horror filmmaking with the original , written by Leigh Whannell, who also appeared in the movie as Adam (the photographer chained up with Cary Elwes’ Dr. Gordon). Whannell also recurs in the Insidious movies as Specs, one of the vaguely comic relief-y paranormal investigators who shows up from time to time. There’s also a weirdly cute drawing of Billy, the Jigsaw puppet, on a chalkboard early on in the first Insidious, establishing that they take place in the same universe (just kidding, but maybe?).

The big thing to know about the Insidious movies is that, despite seeming like relatively straightforward haunted house stories at first, they are actually all about a ghost-filled universe called The Further where angry lost spirits get stuck. The Further is usually depicted as some kind of endless black void that sometimes takes the form of a house, but also the demons that reside there can make their own little lairs, apparently. It’s very important lore where the rules are never really explained.

The first Insidious, directed by Wan and written by his Saw buddy Leigh Whannell, stars Wilson and Rose Byrne as Josh and Renai, the parents of a boy named Dalton who falls into a coma shortly after encountering some untold spookiness in the attic of his family’s new house. As time goes on, unexplainable things start happening in the house, including demonic voices and apparitions. Renai believes that their house is haunted, showing a surprising amount of self-awareness for someone in a ghost movie (if only she could pass that on to literally anyone in any Paranormal Activity movie) and convinces Josh to move their family out of the house. Unfortunately, the spooky happenings continue, with a demon with a bright red face appearing to scare everyone. The family calls a psychic named Elise (the great Lin Shaye) and her lovable team of investigators (Angus Sampson and Whannell) to investigate.Elise reveals that the house isn’t haunted at all, but that Dalton accidentally tapped into The Further and got trapped. It also turns out that Josh can tap into The Further as well, having had a similarly traumatic experience as a boy that he had suppressed in which a spirit tried to possess him. Josh goes into The Further to find Dalton, evading the red-faced demon and various other ghostly beings before running into the very same spirit that tried to possess him as a kid. He escapes with Dalton and everything is fine … until Josh kills Elise, having been possessed while in The Further.

A lot of this movie is explaining the previous movie, with Josh and Elise trapped in The Further and experiencing various things non-chronologically. Adult Josh visits his younger self and leaves behind ghostly evidence that leads his family to the identity of a serial killer that had attacked him when he was a kid. The family finds out that the serial killer was actually killing people because of the evil spirit of his mother, which has now possessed Josh.Meanwhile, Josh’s body keeps trying to murder his family, so Dalton and a friend of Elise’s named Carl enter The Further to save his spirit. Carl had worked with Elise when Josh was a kid to suppress his memories of the ghostly attack, all to preserve the twists of the first movie, and he and Dalton manage to save Josh and bust all of the ghosts. Carl then suppresses their memories again, because you know you’ve got a good plot going when you can’t end your movie without everyone forgetting everything that happened.The movie ends with Elise’s investigator buddies, Specs and Tucker, helping a girl experiencing the same kind of mysterious coma that Dalton had in the first movie, while Elise’s ghostly spirit shows up to help from beyond the grave.

A prequel set shortly before the events of the first movie, Chapter Three is about Elise refusing a call to help a teenager who is experiencing ghostly phenomenon after getting into an accident. Elise has abandoned her ghost-hunting ways after realizing that the spirit that attacked young Josh Lambert was after her, because this takes place before Chapter Two’s main plot but after the flashback stuff in Chapter Two.The teenager’s family calls on Specs and Tucker, believing them to be real ghost hunters, but they’re just internet frauds and they accidentally make this worse. Elise shows up and makes them help—establishing their partnership and friendship—and goes into The Further, evading ghosts and ultimately saving the teenager.

A prequel to the prequel and a sequel to the prequel, The Last Key involves Elise getting wrapped up in a mystery that involves her childhood home, where she first experienced supernatural shenanigans as a kid. She and her brother saw a ghost in their room one night, and when they tried to get help, their father beat Elise and locked her in their basement. She then found a red door, connecting her to The Further, and accidentally released a demon that killed her mother. In the present day, before the events of the first movie, Elise gets a call from the man living in the house now and goes to investigate. A female ghost in the house leads Elise to a secret room in the basement where the new owner has been kidnapping and murdering people. He tries to kill Elise and her friends, including the daughters of her estranged brother, but they beat him and escape, only for the demon that attacked Elise as a kid to return and take one of Elise’s nieces to The Further.There, Elise realizes that this spirit, Keyface, feeds on fear and hatred and had not only driven the owner of the house to capture and kill people but that it had forced Elise’s father to do the same. It turns out that the “ghost” she saw as a kid was actually one of her father’s victims who had escaped. Resisting the urge to beat up her father’s spirit in The Further, which would’ve made the demon stronger, Elise and her niece escape—inadvertently opening a door on the way that reveals young Dalton from the first movie. The Last Key ends with Elise receiving a phone call to help the Lamberts, tying the series into a nice loop.

Well, maybe having multiple people go through a terrifying, reality-altering experience involving a dark dimension full of ghosts and then trying to erase their memories was a bad idea? The trailers for Insidious: The Red Door suggest that memories of the previous movies are bleeding into the present day for Josh and Dalton, as are, you know, the ghosts and stuff. If this is the last Insidious movie, hopefully it taps into the weirdly surprising power and ingenuity that these movies have had, otherwise we’ll just forget which series this is the next time somebody makes a Conjuring or a Sinister again.