The creators of Saw and Paranormal Activity team up to reinvent the haunted-house genre for a new generation with Insidious, which pays tribute to such horror classics as The Exorcist, Poltergeist and The Sixth Sense.
Renai (Rose Byrne) and her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson) are unpacking boxes in their family’s new home when they first start to sense a sinister presence. Eerie events slowly escalate into supernatural attacks until one accident puts their son in a mysterious coma. When the family flees its ghost-ridden home and attempts to heal itself, Josh’s mother (Barbara Hershey) brings in a team of paranormal investigators led by occult expert Elise Reiner (Lin Shaye). Josh and Renai are initially skeptical, but all doubts are swept away with one terrifying discovery: It’s not the house that’s haunted. It’s their son.
Like their previous films Saw and Dead Silence, the latest project from the writer-director team of Leigh Whannell and James Wan traces its origins to their student years at Australia’s M.I.T. “James and I went to film school together at the Melbourne Institute of Technology, where I quickly became his biggest fan,” Whannell explains. “He would make Super-8 stop-motion animations, these outrageously inventive and schlocky fun stories about robots killing zombies! Immediately after I first saw his work, I buttonholed him in the hallway and told him his direction was great but that he needed a writer because the dialogue was terrible! [laughs] After graduating, we were just sort of hanging out and wondering what to do next, throwing around lots of ideas but feeling aimless. We decided we needed to find a film we could do really cheaply.”
They came up with three ideas, explains Wan: “First, we really wanted to make a haunted house movie, but one that felt fresh and unique. There were so many entries in the genre that we both happened to love — films like The Innocents, the original version of The Haunting, and of course our nostalgic childhood favorites Poltergeist and The Exorcist. But because the genre had been done to death, we really wanted to upend its conventions and twist its clichés. If we could hook the audience with a favorite scenario, then we could subvert their expectations in ways that felt original and unexpected. We also had a second idea about astral projection, out-of-body experiences–a premise we both found inherently cool yet strangely unexplored on film.”
At the time however they decided to focus on their third idea, expanding it into a feature-length screenplay and then adapting a central scene into a short film. With the script in one hand and the DVD in the other they headed to Hollywood and shopped around their proposal, a down-and-dirty exploitation film they called Saw. From a tiny amount of seed capital (just a six-figure budget), Wan and Whannell produced one of last decade’s landmark horror movies, the flagship work in a franchise that’s grown to seven films and grossed over $850 million worldwide.
Yet despite the snowballing commercial success of the Saw films, Wan and Whannell had to fight for creative control over their subsequent project: the Universal-financed gothic horror Dead Silence (a film inspired by the macabre movies of Britain’s Hammer Films Productions in the 50s, 60s and 70s). “Dead Silence was our studio trial-by-fire,” says Whannell. “It was a surprisingly hellish experience to think you’re making the film you want to make only to have studio higher-ups impose major changes. Because of many circumstances surrounding the production, James and I were not able to produce the film we wanted to. So I still hungered for a chance to make our definitive Horror.”
Enter Steven Schneider, Jason Blum and Oren Peli, the producers and writer-director of the breakout Horror success Paranormal Activity. “Steve Schneider introduced Oren and I to James and Leigh,” says Blum. “There was so much fuss made about Saw versus Paranormal Activity, so we were naturally very eager to meet them and talk. Truth be told, we are all fans of genre movies and instantly bonded over our shared favorites.”
“We thought it would be a very interesting opportunity,” says Oren Peli of the eventual partnership. “As great fans of Saw who saw much talent on display in Dead Silence despite studio interference, we wanted to see James and Leigh make the horror movie they wanted to make. By carefully planning the shoot, we could achieve high-quality production values on a modest budget and compressed shooting schedule, and provide James and Leigh the creative freedom one rarely gets within the industry.”
Where Saw’s use of body horror and squirm-inducing violence pushed the recent cycle of “extreme” genre films to its baroque limit, Insidious looks back to a more classical style of horror. “I wanted a chilling film in the vein of The Innocents or The Others,” says Whannell. “Saw couldn’t have been a PG film. But Insidious [rated PG-13] is a haunted house movie, and I think the gore can almost be a hindrance. It’s better to see a shadow in your peripheral for a blinking second than have someone rush out of the corner and rip your head off. One puts the audience on edge and scares, the other just viscerally slams them.”
“I think Insidious is the kind of movie Hitchcock would have made today,” says Peli. “I thought I was immune to these kinds of jump scares, you know? But every single one of them got me. I haven’t had that experience since I was a kid. A lot of horror movies today are going for shock factor. This one goes for old-fashioned horror, you know? When the film goes ‘BOO!’ you jump out of our seat.”
“Insidious” is now showing on Video On Demand. Check your cable system for availability.
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© 2011 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.
