2026 / Dir. Jacob Chase
Rating: 3/5
Watch if you like: Insidious 1-5; watching dental hygiene videos of mutant old people who have never brushed their teeth.
With 2023’s Insidious: The Red Door, the series seemed to be dead in the water. The fifth flick in the once-fun haunted-house series limped to the finish line of the Lambert Family’s saga (for now) without much in the way of scares and bloated series baggage. But it made $189 million on a $16 million budget, so here we are again with Insidious: Out of the Further, which does just enough to make the series, at the very least, entertaining again while still feeling stuck in place.
New director Jacob Chase (Come Play) shows mastery of the spooky-house elements that made the first movie a hit. Opening in 1999, a young girl comes home from school to find her mother strung out on the kitchen table and is left to fend for herself. The house is shot to seem full of impossibly long hallways, interconnected rooms, and dark corners. When the girl’s mother starts freaking out and wandering the house with a knife, she’s able to move through the house all too quickly. Out of the Further knows when to show restraint and build up tension, often dropping the score to near silence, parking the scary thing in plain view, and letting the seconds tick by until it’s noticed. It’s incredibly effective.
There are a couple of other terrific set pieces, too, like an endless Backrooms-style couch fort full of creepy mutant old people and a gross-out dental visit that channels the spirits of Sam Raimi and early Peter Jackson. Chase has to limit the nastiness because of the PG-13 rating, but he clearly pushes the limit as far as he can and has a blast doing it. It’s a shame that Insidious: Out of the Further gets more and more restrained by the series’ baggage as it goes on.
The conceit here is when the Lambert family closed the titular “red door” of the last film and locked in their demon, a new one opened, this time allowing the demonic entity of a former cult leader (Sam Spruell) to try to gain control over Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor), who possesses the ability to bring things in and out of “The Further,” the universe’s version of purgatory whose fog and blue lighting has long lost the eerieness it once had. If this entity can get control of Gemma, then he plans to unleash all sorts of evil nasties into the real world.
While he does have three cult former disciples still alive (the mutant old people I’ve touched on) who cause a lot of mischief, we never get hordes of ghost demons terrorizing the waking world the way The End of Oak Street leaned all the way into dinosaurs in the suburbs (many of the cool parts in the trailer of the dead terrorizing a neighborhood come from a dream sequence of sorts). Instead, Gemma has to try to find Lin Shaye’s character, Elise, who died several films ago and should really be left to rest in peace, who needs to be channeled through a tattoo artist who receives visions that she tattoos onto grapefruits (yes, really).
So instead of more of the inventive sequences that start the film, we get the same type of Scooby-Doo mission, minus the other supporting characters that have long departed the franchise, where Gemma and Elise have to venture through foggy corridors to seal a red door and Gemma can deal with the same type of intergenerational family ghost trauma that the series can’t let go of and never has anything to really say about. There was an opportunity here to take an off-ramp and go for a more anthology approach, where each new Insidious movie brings up a new demon with its own style, but it feels like they hit the brakes too early here.
For teenagers looking for a scary movie to go on a first date, or anyone new to the series that’s not as familiar with all the Insidious clichés, then Out of the Further is going to be a lot of fun. For series die-hards, there’s just enough juice here to get you a little excited about the franchise. And for the rest of us, wait for streaming.
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