Early on, eldest son Dalton ( Ty Simpkins) falls into an unexplainable coma. In the first film, the Lambert family has just moved into a spooky house. Where the Saw movies revel in gore and moments of extreme pain, Insidious features almost no blood and is more about creating an eerie, atmospheric mood. Somewhat surprisingly - especially for Saw fans - Insidious was more suggestive than overt. It was sold as the first major collaboration between the brains behind the Paranormal Activity films ( Oren Peli, who produced) and the Saw films ( James Wan, who directed, and Whannell, who wrote). Insidious (2011): Produced on a tiny budget, Insidious was a surprise hit that raked in tons of profit. Let’s trace the story through the three that exist so far. Screenwriter Leigh Whannell (who has not only written all three movies so far but also starred in all three and directed the third) pulls a fairly ingenious bait-and-switch in the franchise’s first film. What’s Insidious about?Īt their most basic level, the Insidious movies are haunted house stories - or, more accurately, not quite that.

And it’s a series, above all, about family. It’s a series that attempts to restore the creepiness of the afterlife. It’s a series of movies where essentially nobody dies - a rarity in the horror genre - because death is merely the start of an entirely new chapter of the story. There’s also the growing indie horror scene, where projects like It Follows and The Babadook tell some of the scariest stories ever committed to celluloid.īut the horror franchise that just might emerge as the representative of the current era is a bit of an underdog. We have the found-footage Paranormal Activity movies and the burgeoning, devil-child world of the Sinister films. Just five years in, the 2010s are already home to several contenders for a decade-defining horror franchise that speaks to How We Live Today.

The archly ironic '90s begat the head-spinningly meta Scream movies, while the brutal, violent 2000s launched the Saw films. The morality- and mortality-obsessed 1980s birthed the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies, which doubled as tracts on the virtues of staying a virgin as long as possible. Every generation’s teenagers eventually get the horror film franchise they deserve.

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