Talking Points After Seeing Insidious The Red Door
The Insidious franchise has just seen the fifth movie in the franchise, Insidious the Red Door. It has become a franchise renowned for its amazing jump scares and for taking us to the nightmare world of The Further. After watching the movie, I would like to discuss a few things from the movie. This isn’t having a dig at anything in the movie, just having an open discussion about them.
There will be FULL SPOILERS for the movie below.
Here are the Talking Points After Seeing Insidious The Red Door
1 – Patrick Wilson Horror Run
Patrick Wilson has stepped into the Insidious and the Conjuring franchise. Both franchises he has now starred in three movies and has been amazing in every single film. In the Conjuring franchise, he shows his excellent chemistry with Vera Farmiga as the Warrens. While in Insidious he has had to take various roles depending on which character is controlling his body. He stepped behind the camera for Red Door and kept his character feeling fresh and within the world. The point is not many actors can jump into two franchises at the same time and make such a big impact as he has.
2 – Ty Simpkins Getting Top Billing
This might be a small factor, but seeing Ty Simpkins getting top billing does seem strange. Patrick Wilson is still a major part of the movie and receives second billing. While Rose Byrne has a smaller role, so you can understand her lower listing on the credits. I will make the point that they are both co-leads and nobody does anything wrong performance-wise. It just left me scratching my head a little because of how iconic Wilson has become in recent years.
3 – Student Mentality
The movie sees Dalton and his roommate Chris start doing basic research into Astro Projection. They don’t get into the biggest warnings about what it could do or how to do it safely. However, it makes sense they just jump into it because it plays into the younger generation’s short attention spans. In the previous prequels, we get strict warnings about how to understand it. This can create problems they face, despite skipping over the cameo adverts from the experts.
4 – The Art Teacher is Extreme
The art teacher Dalton is desperate to learn from seems to be a catalyst for him to start seeing things unlocked. While Dalton’s relationship with Josh is weak, You would have thought Renai would have checked up on teaching methods before sending Dalton to a college. Not being an over-protective mother, but knowing what could happen if he learnt the truth. When it comes to the teacher, she dismisses a student on the first day for nothing, imagine the money he would have spent to be there.
5 – The Trailer is Misleading
The trailer for the movie paints the movie to be of a bonding session between Josh and Dalton. While that isn’t the case, they both start learning more from that time, but they don’t talk to each other throughout the movie. Add in the fact certain scares are missing from the final movie, leaving us with big questions as to what the bigger picture was always meant to be.
6 – Frat House
One of Dalton’s first nightmare journeys sees him meeting a dead student in a frat house. Dalton and Chris decide to return to see if they can learn more about the message he was trying to give. While the scene uses the cool idea of travelling around unseen in a real situation, it flips the focus to Chris getting attacked. Rather than Dalton getting what he wanted. Part of this fills that there was a long sequence that revealed more, but you can’t be sure.
7 – The Further Is Massive
Apart from the excellent camera and lighting effects used to create the Further. The pure scale of it feels massive now. We had previously experienced a little bit of time travelling in it before and the additional use of who is in there is a wonderful addition. My one big question is more to do with Josh and Dalton in it together despite being a 2 day’s drive apart. If I am not mistaken, they have always kept the characters contained in the same area while exploring, even if the world is different.
8 – Sinclair Daniel Steals the Show
The Insidious franchise has always had fun supporting characters, Specs and Tucker usually take up that role. However, they are downed to only a cameo this time. We needed someone to step up and bring a mild amount of humour to the world. Enter Sinclair Daniel as Chris the roommate mix-up. She brings Dalton out of his bubble and encourages him to open up more. She stands up to the frat boys and delivers comical lines at the perfect moment. If we do get another Insidious, Chris must return and she already has a written back story we could dive into.
9 – Male Leads
Traditionally for haunting horror movies, we see a female character needing to overcome evil. Even in the Insidious franchise, we have generally seen women put in more danger than men. However, in this one, we get Josh and Dalton that must explore their own emotional traumas to defeat the demons. It is a refreshing spin on horror and shows that men need to talk more about their feelings. Josh shows this most with his lifelong anger at his father he never met.
10 – Sequel Potential
Insidious always felt like a movie that got forced into sequels. However, it has thrived with interesting stories using Elise’s endless stories of encounters from her own childhood to create effective scary movies. By introducing Dalton back into the story and seeing his willingness to learn more. We could easily see Dalton and Chris team up for more stories in the future. The big thing Dalton possesses is the abilities Elise used with his artwork.
11 – 9 Years Changes A Lot
One of the big factors the movie uses is the big-time jump. Josh and Renai are divorced and not much really gets explained about why. There are hints of the aftermath of the incident, but nothing feels concrete. Dalton has also changed a lot, while it could be a typical teenager figure, after what he has been through, you feel more care to not let that happen would have been put in. After everything this family had been through, it feels like they would have been closer than ever, not this separated.
These are 11 talking points I have after seeing Insidious The Red Door., do you have any talking points after seeing Insidious the Red Door?
