Insidious (2010)
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After the disappointing Dead Silence, director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell team up with the Paranormal Activity producers to deliver one of the more creative and genuinely creepy theatrical releases in years. Having said that, the film unfortunately loses a lot of its atmosphere and creepiness towards the end thanks to the fact that it shows the audience entirely too much, losing its simplicity and resulting in a mish-mash of several scares and ideas thrown together with little effect.
The story revolves around a young family that move into a new home, where one of the sons mysteriously falls into a coma and strange, seemingly paranormal incidents occur following the boy's comatose state. Thinking the house may be haunted, the wife attempts to confide in her husband, who naturally shrugs it off. That is, until one night where the wife is attacked by a malevolent spirit, which also triggers a series of other events that convinces the family to finally GTFO.
After moving into a new home, it's not long before they realize that the evil has followed them over to this new house, so they enlist the help of an old family friend/paranormal investigator to determine the cause and potential reasoning for all this madness. After a little walk around the house, the psychic reveals that their comatose son is attracting evil and malicious spirits, who are using his body as a temporary gateway into our world.
As I said earlier, Insidious has some genuinely creepy scenes in the first half, thanks to its simplicity and excellent use of sounds. One scene in particular that stands out for me involves a ghost overlooking the baby in its crib -- I definitely got some nice chills going in that scene. However, towards the end of the second half things start to fall apart. The audience is just given way too much at once, causing it to lose a lot of its chilling atmosphere, tension-building, and overall general creepy that was so prominent in the first half.
The problem mostly lies in the last 30-minutes when the father is forced to travel deep into the spirit world known as "The Further" in order to retrieve his boy. Although there were a few somewhat decent scenes, it just seemed like we viewers were shown way too much, especially when it came to the main demon that was looking to possess the boy. This said-demon was somewhat frightening in the bits and pieces we see of him, but by the end of the flick we're shown too much of him, which removed any remaining mystery or potential scares and spookiness the character could've had for the audience. This is especially a problem since the filmmakers decide to have this supposedly badass demonic spirit look like some kind of Darth Maul fanboy.
Despite losing a lot of tension and scares towards the end, Insidious still remains to be one of the better, more original and genuinely scary, recent horror films to hit the big screen. Definitely give this flick a look if you haven't already.