Insidious: Out of The Further recently hit theaters for the summer as the sixth installment of the Insidious franchise. However, was this movie even needed? The premise of the overall series will reveal this.
The Original Tale – Insidious (2010)
The movie tells the story of a small family who moved into a home, where their son fell from coming down an attic, resulting in him being in a coma. Since then, strange hauntings have occurred in their home. As a need for answers leads to desperation, the Lambert family, with advice from the husband’s mother, receives aid from a psychic named Elise.
It is then revealed that the son and father both share a common gift of astral projection. We learn that their son’s soul is lost in a place called The Further. The family must rely on the father’s ability, with the help of Elise, to bring their son’s soul back into his body. However, malevolent spirits wish to take advantage of this power for their own benefit.
Insidious: Out of the Further
The movie takes place seven years after the events in the fifth movie, Insidious: The Red Door.
A woman named Gemma is raising her daughter in the home that she grew up in. The home was part of her inheritance some time after her mother committed suicide when Gemma was a little girl. Presently, all seems to be well until Gemma starts to experience nightmares that end up becoming vividly real. She starts to find items from her dream appear beside her in the real world.
Due to a situation occurring at her dentist job with a customer, she manages to escape ghostly apparitions with the help of the spirit of Elise, who died at the end of the first film. Elise directs Gemma to a woman who works at a tattoo parlor with special gifts of her own. Through her ability to channel spirits, the tattoo artist connects with Elise. Elise speaks through the tattoo artist to Gemma that there are ghostly apparitions who want to use her ability to take things from a place known as The Further into the real world. In short, the spirits want to use Gemma’s gift to have the dead and demons roam the Earth once again.
An Unneeded Sequel – Hollywood Scheme
Insidious: Out of the Further leaves you unfazed as to what happens next. The movie does not add to anything of the pre-existing films, and feels more like a nail in the coffin than a continuation of the series as a whole.
The entertainment industry has revealed a trend regarding utilizing preexisting IPs in film and other storytelling media like video games.
- With film, first they publish a work theatrically.
- If it is successful, then they create more.
- After some success, they tend to swap the lead characters of the overall story to fit a certain kind of niche.
- This tactic is used to piggyback off the success of one franchise in order to splice in their rhetoric and viewpoints.
- Relying on the success of the original content is key for it creates an ease of adding in new or re-imagined characters that fit their sociopolitical beliefs.
For this franchise, the lead character Josh Lambert, played by actor Patrick Wilson, is the main focus in three of the six films, with Elise at the epicenter in all six. With this new movie, they swap Lambert out with an entirely different lead character that fits the piggyback scheme. In this case, they made the movie more female-centric by making the lead character a woman named Gemma Hall, played by actress Amelia Eve, where Elise played by actress Lin Shaye is the Guardian archetype of this story. So in a way, this new movie does nothing to add to the existing lore as a whole, and it feels almost like a reboot in disguise or a spin-off, because of it.
Insidious: Out of the Further feels more like the combination of a sequel behaving like a spin-off more than anything. The film has a lot of plot holes, leaving you with more unanswered questions, which does nothing for the franchise as a whole. It’s not worth the movie ticket, but worth seeing on TV and streaming out of curiosity.
