Josh and Renai Lambert have moved into a new house.  It’s a big house, with plenty of rooms for them and their three children (the youngest still in-diapers new) and an attic.  The attic proves a little treacherous for their son Dalton, who likes to wear a cape and play superhero.  Dalton takes a spill in the attic from a creaky old ladder, and hurts his pride more than anything else.  It’s quite weird then when Dalton slips into a coma.  The doctors run every test they know, and come up short with no answers to this medical mystery.

With doctor and hospital bills mounting, Josh, a teacher, is working as much, and as late, as he can.  Renai, a songwriter, is taking care of the house and the kids while trying to craft some tunes in between.  Dalton is at home, comatose, on a feeding tube.  With Josh away from home so much, it’s good ol’ mom who notices that things aren’t quite right in their new big comfy house.  There’s too many bumps in the night and one too many angry voices coming over the baby monitor.  Not to mention the other people Renai sees walking around the house.

Renai convinces Josh that they have just chosen a bad house to live in.  So they move again.  This new house isn’t so massive and scary, it doesn’t have that Spooky House look, you know.  So the Lambert family is home free.  That assumption is dead wrong.  Whatever was haunting them at their previous residence, has followed them.  What they soon learn, and what any of us have learned from the movie’s advertising campaign, is that it’s not the house that’s haunted– it’s Dalton.  There are spirits, and a demon, vying for possession of the boy’s body.  I could be wrong, but I don’t think they make a pill for that.


I love this movie.  I don’t know why I waited so long to see it.  I actually got chills watching Insidious, it’s a creepy little movie.  I love a ghost story, and this is one of the best I’ve seen in a very long time.  It ranks up there with Poltergeist, a movie I thought it was going to rip off, and it does borrow from that classic in the last act, but it doesn’t do it in a cheap way.

Insidious is a beautiful film to look at, excellent production design and cinematography.  From the big spooky house at the start of the film to the smaller, ordinary, house the family moves into later, the filmmakers have suffused the atmosphere with true creepiness.  Director James Wann and writer Leigh Whannell (creators of the Saw franchise) have filled Insidious with some really unsettling and scary imagery.  A great movie that tells a great story.

This is a perfect movie for the Halloween season.

5 out of 5
John Jason