In recent years, the horror genre has seen an influx of gore and violence. Instead of being scared, audiences are trying to keep their last meals down, covering their eyes to avoid seeing mangled and gushing guts. Even worse, horror movie plots are more formulaic than ever.
But now there’s Insidious. The makers of Saw and Paranormal Activity combine elements of a good scare while challenging what moviegoers think they know about horror films.
Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) assume their new house is haunted. Fearing for the safety of their three children (including their comatose son played by Ty Simpkins), they move into a new place — only to discover the house wasn’t haunted. Their son is.
With the conclusion of the Saw franchise, James Wan, director, and Leigh Whannell, writer, wanted to create a horror film that was not only scary and creepy but also original.
Insidious was shot in only 22 days, which Wan said was tough. He was able to pull it off though.
“If you go into a project with knowing exactly what you want, then you can just hit it and move forward and make it work,” he said.
For Insidious, Whannell had two roles — as writer and actor (the ghost-buster character Specs).
Both had their appeals, he said. As writer, Whannell said he kept his own schedule, which was torturous at times. Acting, he said, is more fun because people “fuss” over you.
To prepare for the role, Whannell and Angus Sampson, the other half of the ghost-buster duo, met up with real ghost-busters who took them to an abandoned hospital in Los Angeles. Whannell also talked with a medium. Living with Sampson for more than 10 years, he said, also contributed to their bizarre, yet realistic bond in Insidious.
The inspiration for the scares was based on stories they heard from their friends and families, Wan said. Whannell, who never experienced paranormal activity before, hoped that someone would appear in the abandoned hospital, but no one did.
An element to the Wan-Whannell trademark is their usage of unique contraptions. With Insidious, they introduced audiences to more gadgets, such as the gas mask contraption.
“The design process takes an ample amount of time and the making of it was actually pretty quick,” Wan said.
“I think we push ourselves to come up with something that’s a little different,” Whannell said. “We’re big prop fanatics… it’s us wanting to put a stamp of originality on the stuff we do.”
Something that Insidious will do is make audiences laugh. For a horror film, the thought of laughing is quite unimaginable.
Whannel said that he and James would “rather have people kind of giggling at [their] originality than just, you know, watching a film that sits tight in the middle ground.”
Whannell explained that upon watching the re-release of The Exorcism, a film raved in the ‘70s as one of the scariest films of all time, it elicited laughter from the teenage audience. He realized then the audience has changed.
“It’s hard to get past people’s wall in today’s era,” Whannell said.
To combat, they deliberately included funny characters so that the audience would laugh at the them, and not misdirect their laughter toward a scene that is supposed to be scary.
Collectively, the two are mulling over a sci-fi idea which has a good chance of being their next project together.
“James and I were both thinking about making something outside the horror genre and we both feel like a sci-fi film is something that is so far removed, but it’s different enough that it won’t be the same old thing,” Whannell said.
One of Wan’s next films is Nightfall, an adaptation of a graphic novel about a prison run by vampires.
Insidious hits theaters nationwide April 1.
