By Malice Intended

In the upcoming horror film Insidious, a young family has to contend with the mysterious occurrences that plague their new home.  Married couple Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) have moved themselves and their three children into an old Victorian house. When their son Dalton slips into a mysterious coma, the situation intensifies. The boy seems to be attracting malevolent spirits.  Those same spirits have his mind trapped in a dark netherworld known as “The Further.”  Josh and Renai are forced to put their marital problems on the back burner to face this new and frightening threat to their family.

Insidious represents the melding of two recent and prominent trends in the horror genre.  The film was written and directed by James Wan, the man behind the torture porn franchise Saw.  It was also produced by Oren Peli, the man behind the hugely successful haunted house “mockumentary” Paranormal Activity.  The combined sensibilities of these two suggest a film that is very much in tune with current tastes.  The response to the film after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival was enthusiastic and it will arrive in theaters on April 1^st preceded by extremely positive word of mouth.

The trailer employs both current and traditional imagery in its arsenal.  Immediately, it is established that the child is at the center of this threat.  The young boy is shown deep in a coma with a nasal gastric tube in his right nostril.  The image is more than a little reminiscent of similar shots of the fully possessed Reagan Macneil in The Exorcist, sans the facial scarring and demonic makeup.

The audience is then shown a number of foreboding images in strobe light fashion, accompanied by schizophrenic editing and some choice lines of dialogue that vaguely spell out the basic premise.  As busy as this trailer is, it reveals surprisingly little.  There aren’t any “money shots” to speak off.  This is a good thing, as even teaser trailers are prone to give away far too much in this day and age.

While the Saw franchise helped plunged the horror genre into one of the most fruitless periods of its existence, the flawed, but effective Paranormal Activityfilms helped bring it back to its roots.  There doesn’t appear to be much middle ground between the two approaches, but James Wan and Oren Peli seem eager to set a precedent.  Audiences are becoming more jaded and cynical by the day, and many horror directors have opted to take the easy way out with obvious gimmicks and tactics.  The positive reviews for Insidious bode well for the film.  It’s good to see that some filmmakers still value the fundamentals of a good Ghost story.

[pro-player width=’425′ height=’344′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z29IDZRYw0 [/pro-player]

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