What I appreciate about horror series is the combination of reliability and variability: within clearly defined rule systems, the individual entries can become the playing field for new aesthetics, narrative strategies and thematic approaches, which is why the quality curve is rarely linear – even the tenth part of an established franchise can still gain new impulses from a material or at least vary the existing one in an attractive way. “Insidious 6: Out Of The Further” is a good example of this in its best moments.
With “Insidious” (2010) and “The Conjuring” (2013), director James Wan unleashed a wave of supernatural, somewhat old-fashioned spooky films that would have a decisive influence on horror cinema in the first half of the decade. A decade and a half and numerous trends later, the “Insidious” series has reached its sixth edition and has long since been freed from any pressure of relevance: one horror franchise among many, which inevitably spread its increasingly twisted lore on different time levels, sometimes touching on the form of a serial killer thriller (part 4) or that of a college film (part 5), with varying success. The face of the series, medium Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), is a woman now over 80 years old who died in the opening film and whose unexpected popularity forced those responsible to make all sorts of chronological contortions.
Gemma (Amalia Eve) struggles with her childhood trauma
“Insidious 6: Out Of The Further” now takes place a few years after “The Red Door” and picks up again after the story of the Lambert family around Josh and Renai (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) seemed to have been told for the time being: Gemma (Amelia Eve) is introduced as the new protagonist, who moves into her childhood home with her daughter Maya (Island Austin), although she associates the place with a traumatic event that she still carries with her to this day. So of course it’s only a matter of time before the repressed memories come to the surface again.
What’s more, when she is suddenly haunted by disturbing nightmares, she develops behavior in which she disturbingly recognizes her mother. At first, Gemma believes that she is about to pass on her emotional turmoil to Maya – but she soon realizes that demonic forces are behind the changes. The dental hygienist has a connection to the so-called Eternal Realm (in the original: “the Further”), an in-between world populated by ghosts. And Gemma even discovers a special ability: she can transport objects and residents into the world of the living and is thus targeted by Cyrus (Sam Spruell), a particularly powerful demonic entity who would only be too happy to leave the Eternal Realm. She receives support in her fight from Elise, who has been walking on the other side since her death.
Some of the scariest scenes in the entire series
Director Jacob Chase (“Come Play”), who also wrote the screenplay together with David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (“Orphan”), modifies the laws of the “Insidious” mythology and thus gradually expands the range of possibilities in the series. Several functions are attributed to the Eternal Empire: It is a kind of negative of reality, a window into the past and a diffuse threshold place in which the boundaries of space, time and consciousness become permeable – but last but not least, Chase also knows that he simply has an extremely productive chamber of horrors here that can be filled with monstrosities and grotesqueries of all kinds at will.
“Insidious 6” shows its greatest strengths before the door to the eternal realm is crossed: the opening sequence, which takes place in Gemma’s childhood, earns each of its numerous jump scares by patiently preparing their effect through disorienting camera movements and the suggestive use of silence. This pattern continues: When Gemma first comes into contact with the Eternal Empire, the film takes a conspicuous amount of time to build up her tension. For what feels like minutes, he lets his protagonist fish for the flashlight that she just tripped over and then rolled under the bed, using the limitations of the light cone extremely effectively to unsettle her gaze.
What do the creepy old people at Gemma’s door want?
An actually brilliantly orchestrated suspense scene that even touches on the paradoxical spatial logic of the “Backrooms” follows just a short time later: Gemma crawls into a cave made of pillows built by Maya, which closes in around her and narrows into a seemingly endless tunnel. And something else is new in the “Insidious” universe: the joy of the repulsive – especially in a scene in which one of the three strange old people who constantly lurk around Gemma’s house appears in the dentist’s chair in her practice. The film savors the disgust of dental decay with surprising relish and even places the camera into the patient’s rotting oral cavity. A moment of physical drama that you wouldn’t have expected in an “Insidious” film.
But of course “Insidious 6” also has to meet certain requirements, and so the second half is much less successful. The attempts to incorporate “Out Of The Further” into a franchise continuum and to reactivate something recognizable are also among the less productive impulses here. Especially in the confusing, almost never-ending finale, Chase completely gives in to the tendency towards uniform noise. But even there is good news hidden in this: Although the film initially seeks proximity to the subgenre of trauma horror, which has been overused in recent years, it does not use the psychological injuries of its characters as confirmation of its own claim to significance – and, if in doubt, is more interested in tangible horror than in reducing its monsters to their function as ciphers.
Conclusion: “Insidious 6: Out Of The Further” is particularly successful where it leaves the familiar path and creates space for directorial ideas. In the second half, his own franchise mechanics catch up with him again, but until then Jacob Chase still defies the Eternal Empire with some astonishingly eerie images.