The family home can be a fortress, a safe haven, and a refuge. It can also be a prison cell, combat zone, or even death sentence. Horror cinema has often leaned to the latter possibilities, as seen in franchises like Paranormal Activity, The Amityville Horror, and any number of home-invasion movies. Each time, the lesson remains the same: The unassuming family home can flip from shelter to scary in an instant.
Insidious, the 2010s series from the minds of Leigh Whannell and James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring), turns the family home into a halfway house for evil thanks to a sinister red door. The first installment follows a family whose life completely unravels when their young son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), suddenly falls into a coma and can’t be revived. Unbeknownst to them, Dalton has actually been pulled into a purgatory-like spiritual world called “the Further.” It’s a dark and otherworldly astral plane populated by tormented souls that lie in wait for an innocent vessel to corrupt. A lone door proves to be the only passageway — in or out — separating everyday life from this hellish realm.
The franchise returns this weekend with the latest installment, one that’s focused on just that crimson entrance. Insidious: The Red Door brings back original stars Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson, reprising their roles as Renai and Josh, parents of now-18-year-old Dalton as he heads to college to leave behind his trying adolescence. But Dalton’s dreams of having a normal adulthood soon become undone when repressed demons from his troubled past return to antagonize him and his family.
Here, we work through the five Insidious installments to prime you to tackle the franchise — and find a safe passageway through that same scarlet-colored door.
5. Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)
In this uneven prequel to the first Insidious, our resident spiritual adviser and astral-plane traveler, Elise (Lin Shaye), tries to help a teenage girl who is being stalked by an unearthly spirit. Although Quinn (Stefanie Scott) first approaches Elise for a psychic reading, she’s knocked back because Elise has given up using her paranormal abilities and talking with the other side. Still, it’s during this encounter with Quinn that Elise senses that something nefarious has indeed crossed over into reality. Known as the “man in the vent,” this grotesque, abject presence — who wears an oxygen mask — covets Quinn as his own and violently tries to take her into that dark underworld, the Further. As Quinn is ensnared by this supernatural force, all father (Dermot Mulroney) can do is watch helplessly while Elise vainly tries to save his daughter.
With a lackluster apartment setting that doesn’t square with the franchise’s typical themes of the violation of a family home, Quinn’s sudden entrapment by a lone, heavy-breathing ghost doesn’t totally stack up. (Perhaps compounded by the bizarre fact the ghoul is reliant on an oxygen mask and tank to breathe.) There are some stunts that get the blood rushing, like a gnarly eyeball blinking back from Quinn’s throat and the infamous red (elevator) door, but Chapter 3’s commitment to the empty story of Quinn’s possession obscures a far more compelling tale found in Elise. Although Elise is an ordinary woman with a difficult lot in life — battling grief, depression, and loneliness — she also possesses remarkable faculties to communicate beyond this world and quell evil ever entering our own. Plus she’s a senior citizen who can serve when she needs to, like when she tackles one rogue demon and screams, “Come on, bitch!” Come for the air vent horror; stay for Elise.
4. Insidious: The Last Key (2018)
Insidious: The Last Key is the complete Elise backstory, detailing her difficult childhood and discovery of her telekinetic talents. In the present day, Elise is asked to return to her old childhood home to help stop a haunting afflicting its current owner. “I don’t have memories of this place. I have scars,” she explains. With her techie sidekicks Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) aboard the Spectral Sightings bus, Elise heads back only to discover that there are more than just demonic spirits living at the house. Stacks upon stacks of the Holy Bible, creepy sets of keys, and a lost copper whistle are just some of the clues into what corrupt infestation has taken place.
This installment trumps Insidious 3 by blending human paranoia with phantom superstition — all in the family home. It also gives Shaye greater space to etch out a more nuanced Elise, showing real battle scars and buried trauma haunting her like the rest of us. Plus the film does a clever job showing how some of Elise’s strange childhood visions were actual interactions with literal girls fleeing from her house (after Elise’s father had imprisoned them). Spooky! Some self-aware play with suspense — like where Elise opens and closes stolen suitcases, each time nervously thinking a spirit might pop out — also helps smooth over some of this film’s convoluted Further story line (such as it suddenly transformed to an underground prison with the demon Keyface acting as warden to Elise’s incarcerated family members). With the focus returned to family home, The Last Key shows how a family united can always overcome the force of the Further — and their own troubled past too.
3. Insidious: The Red Door (2023)
The newest installment, The Red Door, picks things up a decade on from Insidious 2 as Dalton heads to college (mercifully skipping Insidious 3 and 4). At 18, Dalton is one disaffected and cynical kid who resents his father and spends most of his time sketching creepy charcoal drawings. When his art teacher prompts the class to explore their hidden subconscious, Dalton unfortunately reignites his suppressed astral-traveling abilities. (We learn that psychic Elise had previously banished the memories of the Further from both father and son.) Once that door is opened again, there’s nothing holding it closed. Josh, meanwhile, struggles to come to terms with his strange and empty life now, ranging from gnawing memory problems to the breakdown of his marriage to Renai.
Star Patrick Wilson, making his directorial debut, frames this third sequel as a psychological study of trauma and family violence. Although Dalton’s deeply troubling childhood ordeal has been buried for almost a decade — for both father and son — uncovering the Further and its destruction now years later can be just as traumatic. While The Red Door isn’t much of a horror show, there still are some jump scares about. When Josh takes an MRI scan to help work out the cause of his memory issues, we’re served a truly terrifying moment trapped in that white canister. Beyond this, the film makes some smart comments on the bittersweet power of art to both physicalize pain and provide liberation from it. With cute cameos from Elise plus Specs and Tucker (via YouTube), the larger comment on the sacrifices we make for family — all while battling trauma — prove pretty stirring to watch.
2. Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)
Hauntings actually run in the family. Insidious: Chapter 2 first takes us back to 1986 to reveal the elder Lambert’s own close calls with the Further. We learn that Josh possessed rare childhood abilities to astral project into other worlds, both light and dark, until Elise put the kibosh on those powers. Now, years later, Josh’s suppressed faculties have resurfaced. So much so that he has actually become possessed by an evil entity known as the “Bride in Black.” This malevolent figure is the spirit of evil mass murderer Parker Crane (Tom Fitzpatrick) from Insidious, who is now baying for blood via Josh’s live body. Crane’s backstory is a perverse — even problematic — one to digest, which involves his unhinged mother forcing her young son to live life as a girl. You can assume what the film says happens next.
Chapter 2 embraces a host of different horror tropes — from aughts handicam footage to Hitchcockian Dolly shots — to maximize terror in viewers, and for the most part it works. The Bride in Black backstory is sometimes forced, but if you overlook the unhinged mother, the bigger tension around father-and-son astral entrapments and the fight to reunite the family redeems all. Daytime spooks prove to heighten the frights, as slamming piano keys, a kiddie toy that continues to light up while off, and slapping spirits all give big jump scares. Rest assured, however, humor is often not far off, provided by the often unhelpful paranormal-tech assistants. Other highlights include Barbara Hershey (as grandmother Lorraine) playing detective in the asylum and Wilson giving us a fully realized mad doppelgänger, as the real Josh remains trapped in the Further and his evil twin reigns in reality.
1. Insidious (2010)
Announcing itself with infamously abrupt and unnerving opening credits, the original Insidious is the irrefutable standout to the series. The O.G. players — Byrne, Wilson, Hershey — deliver raw performances in a truly sinister story that takes demonic possession to a new (astral) level. Josh and Renai, having recently moved into a new house, find that their son, Dalton, has fallen into a coma. Medical science struggles to explain the reason. As sounds in the night start — slamming doors and voices over the baby monitor — the pair recruit paranormal specialist Elise to help. “It’s not the house that’s haunted. It’s your son,” she warns. So begins the family’s descent into the Further world that has ensnared Dalton with a literal nail-grinding demon guarding him as a trophy prize.
Insidious uses smart ploys and tricks to lure us in, as astral projection and demonic possession conflate into a realistic portrait of evil and undead forces pulling lone victims into a sad purgatory. Old and new technology is eerily haunted, too, with an archaic gas mask enabling Elise to communicate from the other side while new digital cameras capture evil spirits lurking unseen from unaided sight. The darkened color grading — pulling out the life of the stars and reminding us of bygone haunted photos — enmeshes us totally in the suffocating, otherworldly environment that seems impossible to escape. While the sequels expand and reimagine a darker Further, the first terrifies the most for its simple premise, drained aesthetic, and frightening bangs that jolt us awake.
Every Insidious Movie, RankedncG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK57wKuropucmnyqutKim6Knpah6rrvVopysZaKWu6yxw2apnpxdmbywvo2hq6ak