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Top Critics (28)
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DVD (10)
Wan and Whannell have, in effect, ripped pages from the "Poltergeist" playbook and stripped the formulas down to old-style gothic scares.
If there's a complaint to be made about Insidious, it's that the film's second half is unable to live up to the impossibly high standards set by the first half.
Insidious isn't scary. It's laughable. And kind of sad.
There's little new here. And what is new isn't well done.
Nothing slows down a movie down like people sitting around a living room discussing the meaning of "astral projection."
"Insidious" establishes that these folks can make a film that operates on an entirely different level, sans gore, or obvious gimmicks. And make flesh crawl.
Insidious clearly borrows from several sources, but where it fails as a narrative, it succeeds as a shock-a-minute fright fest with plenty of atmosphere and dread.
The ending struggles to explain too much and take itself a bit too literally, but mostly Insidious is an engaging treat.
It may be an essentially shallow ride, but it will make you scared of the dark again. It is a strangely comforting to be reminded of what that feels like.
An engagingly unassuming presentation of an effective yet disappointingly derivative shocker.
There is much to recommend in this reunion of the creative forces behind the dazzling first Saw movie.
For all its creaky-old-dark-house cliches, Insidious is a fun ghost-train ride, full of truly terrifying moments. But once it's over, it's forgotten.
Director James Wan here proves himself very adept at building dramatic tension and making you anxious about the things going on in your peripheral vision.
Is this reminding you of anything? Like, say 77.2% of any horror movies ever made?
Insidious is certainly part of a great tradition of scary films, but it's a little too bland and visually unappealing to be memorable.
They're having such a joke on us because there is a ridiculous element to it and one of the things that I think they fall into the trap of showing too much. Horror and being scared is much more effective without actually seeing.
If the film was attempting to be more than just a horror movie, it doesn't work on that level either.
Insidious is very much a 21st century modern horror movie, which is to say it's more interested in tricks and scares than 'horror'.
Insidious is happy enough with elevating your breathing pattern every now and then, as opposed to choking you outright with one shock after another.
While the third act descends into silliness, for the most part this is a superbly crafted and genuinely scary flick that borrows brilliantly from horror classics.
It's intelligent, it's well-paced, it's packed with both unsettling scenes and pop-up shocks that never feel cheap.
For the majority of its running time Insidious is a scary good time at the movies.
This is a good ol' fashioned haunting, one with a tangible atmosphere, strong performances and plenty of skin-crawling scares.
Wan uses the lack of lighting, shaky camera and creepy music to keep us watching intently.
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