Horror franchises have come and gone over the decades, as both the genre’s most popular aspects and audiences’ feelings toward it evolve, so it’s always interesting to see which ones survive the test of time. There are icons like Halloween and The Evil Dead, and more recent staples have endured like It and Saw, but one of the most peculiar instances of a franchise that has just refused to die is Insidious.

There’s a sort of irony to the fact that director James Wan made the first Insidious before his Conjuring days, and yet the franchise is seen as a forgotten middle child when discussion of modern horror giants takes place. Despite that, the series has remained kicking to the point of now having a sixth entry, Insidious: Out of the Further. The new installment sits at an interesting place in the series as the follow-up to the legacy sequel revamp that was Insidious: The Red Door (2023), moving forward with completely new characters and a fresh premise that evolves series lore, and the results are more mixed than you’d expect. 

Out of the Further starts out building a genuine atmosphere with its silent dread and horror, something that only Wan was able to effectively do in the series before the later sequels devolved into jumpscare city. The issue with this entry, however, is that the longer it goes on and reminds you of its connections to the Insidious franchise, the duller both its concept and scares become, devolving into a more middling grey area. At the very least, it’s a stark improvement over nearly all the other sequels in the franchise, but this entry unfortunately sinks to both franchise and horror trope growing pains.

This time around, we follow Gemma (Amelia Eve), a dental assistant trying her best to maintain a normal, mundane life with her daughter Maya (​​Island Austin). Gemma is still reeling from the traumatic events of her mother’s apparent suicide 20 years ago, while still residing in the house she inherited where it took place, but she finds solace in small moments with her daughter and her boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea). 

As we all know with horror movies, however, past traumas can never stay buried, as Gemma starts to have what she thinks are nightmares of demonic entities haunting her in both her home and work life, but soon discovers the reasons for these hauntings run much deeper. After an encounter in one of her dreams with franchise regular Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), who tells Gemma what we all know: that her dreams are actually astral projections into the world of the further, life after death.

The catch for this entry, however, is that Gemma has a special ability that we have yet to see in this series: the power to take things from the further and bring them into the real world, and one powerful entity, Cyrus (Sam Spruell), wants to harness her power to bring entities of the further into the world to wreak havoc. With more at stake than she could’ve imagined, Gemma must keep fighting off these evil forces while protecting those she loves most. 

Yes, your eyes don’t deceive as yet another horror movie’s thematic and emotional core delves into the dreaded T word: trauma. While the ultimate reveals surrounding the suicide of Gemma’s mother aren’t hard to figure out when introduced, the familial bond between Gemma and her daughter and the hauntings of their past are handled fine enough that it’s never a hindrance even when played out as boilerplate as they come. 

Considering how much both excellent and extremely poor genre films have used the thematic thread of familial trauma to a tee, the real test comes down to how the horror is implemented alongside the crux of the film emotionally; on that front, Out of the Futher is a tale of two halves. The film’s first-act horror sequences not only understand what made 2010’s Insidious so impactful but also craft a few sequences that rival the best Wan has captured in the franchise. 

Writer/Director Jacob Chase displays such good control of a slow build of quieter atmospheric dread early on that it makes a few moments genuinely eerie to sit through. Many of the jump scares, when they pop up, are smaller ones that either are genuinely creative in their setup or end up silently in the background of some shots where the audience only sees something in the background that our lead can’t, or Chase plays with the creepy sensation of hearing but not seeing an unknown horror. All these qualities come to a head in a standout pillow fort sequence that implements all these qualities and makes such excellent use of claustrophobia and liminal spaces that it might stand amongst even the best of what Wan was able to accomplish in the original. 

Unfortunately, the longer the film goes on and further implements the regular strokes of your average Insidious flick, the less interesting both the story and the horror elements become here. What were once creative and playful scares start to become the loud-noise scares most come to expect from the average horror release. The logistics for most of the Insidious films have not always been sound, but the lore surrounding the inheritance of Gemma’s abilities and Cyrus’ ultimate plan starts to border on straight-up convoluted as the film hurdles towards its climax. 

The climax, unfortunately, is the point where the film starts to get purely silly and not in the fun type of way. Any sense of foreboding atmosphere is completely dissipated, and we move towards a point where we see cameos from previous demons of the franchise, like it’s slowly transforming into an Avengers film. There’s nothing wrong with making a tone shift as long as you’re able to retain that same amount of innovation, but aside from the occasional cool camera trick, the bigger the movie’s scale gets, the more any distinct identity it could have had fades away, and it becomes just another Insidious sequel.

It’s always a shame when a film that has initial promise starts to slowly dissipate it as it plods along since Insidious: Out of the Further has a creative enough concept and skilled director helming it to make it impactful but the sequel ultimately succumbs to a clunkier second half and the writing of its central characters that it can never shake as it wraps up. It certainly has the most positives of the post-Wan sequels of the franchise, but that’s ultimately a fairly low bar to clear.

Review Courtesy of Joshua Mbonu

Feature Image Credit to Sony Pictures and Blumhouse Entertainment