‘Insidious’ Among the Best Fright Fests of All Time

Like “Night of the Living Dead” or “Suspiria,” “Insidious” is a barrage of horrifying moments with agreeable drama in between, which is more difficult to accomplish than you might think. Anyone can creep up from behind and frighten you, but when a movie’s got to keep the jolts coming for 102 minutes, it figures that a lesser film would be running on empty by the end. What keeps this one afloat is the array of boogiemen at its disposal – it traps its characters in a maze with terrors at every dead end, all while they brace themselves for a confrontation with the biggest one at the center. You’ll know what the biggest terror is when you see it.

The home that Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) just moved into with their three children feels too big for the simple demands of their everyday lives, but they’re not the only residents on the lease. We don’t see the entities that dwell there at first, although Renai does hear whispers coming from her daughter’s baby monitor (with all that crying, it’s pretty clear that she hears them, too), and little Dalton (Ty Simpkins) can detect an essence in the attic that’s too intriguing to dismiss. The fact that it beckons him right before he lapses into a coma is no coincidence.

Between her son’s coma and evidence of ghosts all over the house, Renai insists the family had better run off and live with Josh’s mother (Barbara Hershey), who’s not as clueless about this as everyone thinks. She dealt with an otherworldly houseguest herself when Josh was a boy, which she banished with the help of a psychic named Elise (Lin Shaye). While the good news is that she’s just a phone call away, the bad news is that she’ll have to face off with a more dangerous force this time – one she can only confront with the assistance of a reluctant father.

In light of how much of the plot got into this review, you might consider its function as a package for frightening moments a flaw, along with the almost campy dialogue and goofy last-laugh stinger. Those rough patches, though, come with the territory in a genre where characters can be anything from aliens to zombies, so you can make allowances for this film’s absurdities. You should, too, because “Insidious” happens to be among the greatest horror movies of all time.

This article was originally published on AllMediaNY.com