As Film Studies Induction Task
Insidious Horror Film Essay by Max Everett
One of my favourite films that I love to watch is called Insidious! In this film it has a few well known faces such as Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye and Barbra Hershey.
This is the start of a film series but only the first two out of the four are about this family. In the film, it is about a family who moved house, soon after, one of their sons called Dalton falls into what they think is a coma. After looking in to more detail into the paranormal they realise that Dalton is actually called something, a traveller! The family is told that in his sleep can move around and although he thinks it is a dream it is actually a different world half between the real one and the world where all of the dead live. The trouble with this is that as Dalton is away from his body, the dead get a chance to find his body and get inside. This could mean that the dead can live again through him as he will be stuck and cannot get back. But it could also mean that they can possess him and as they live through him it will cause a lot of trouble with his family. The father of the family who is played by Patrick Wilson (and seen below) struggles with news and as his wife (who is played by Rose Byrne) feels as though she is being haunted around the house and is very, very scared of the house and the news of her on. The father struggles so much that he pretends to work late so he wouldn’t have to deal with the matter when he got back.

In this film i love all of the editing, even though the rest of the film, as in the way they did it, wasn’t too good I think the editing was a key part of the movie. Another good thing that they do in this film is the lighting, and a third is the sound. These three key parts of a horror film are excellently used though-out. An example of the lighting is represented in the image above. (the same image to show the father of the family who stars in the film). In this part of the film, he is trying to find his son in ‘the further’ as that is the name of the void to where Dalton is. It is all low-key lighting all except for this lantern that he is holding. This is the only item that he can use in order to save his sons life when he knows that he is all alone, the dead are watching and he doesn’t have very long to do this terrifying task. Overall this creates a sense of ‘what’s going to happen next, and it could make the audience feel uneasy as they don’t know who’s watching him.