Insidious (ViewingBlog1)

Insidious

(2010, 103 minutes)

The long credits give this creepy film an eerie feel to something as simple as an opening scene. I feel the fact that this story takes place in an ordinary home, with an ordinary family, makes it more relatable to an everyday person. In the beginning the family starts out getting ready for school and work, the mother unpacking boxes as they just moved into a new home. The mother is cooking breakfast and on the phone with some automated machine, saying “Speak to an agent.” It’s clear that a normal, mundane life is trying to be portrayed.

Dalton, one of the two sons, took a pretty steep fall, which turned out to be nothing. There was seemingly no cause to why all of the sudden the next day he doesn’t wake up and he’s in a coma unlike any other, or so the doctor says,

“There is no brain damage, that we’ve detected. Technically, yes, he is in a coma. He doesn’t react to stimuli, he has no sleep-wake cycle but there’s no brain trauma or infection. The scans are all normal. To be honest, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Mom, “He can’t just not wake up? I mean, there’s gotta be something.”

Doc, “I’m sorry.”

Dad, “Okay so what do we do? Do we stay here? Do we-"

Doc, “Conduct further testing, it’s only been a couple of days, it could take a little longer.”

The horror of waking up for work like every other day, walking into your child’s bedroom and your child just being unresponsive, is like no other. I couldn’t imagine that kind of terror. The worst part about all of that is not knowing what happened to him or why he’s like this. You might start to blame yourself. It leaves not just the characters to wonder but the viewers, as well.

A couple of days in a coma turns into months, and Dalton’s moved home, where one of the creepiest scenes in the entire movie takes place. The mom is downstairs playing the piano with her baby girl sleeping in the upstairs bedroom when what sounds like a frequency interruption on the baby monitor catches her attention. She listens close as angry whispers turn into loud shouts that she can hear are coming from inside the house and even wakes her baby up.

The mom seems to experience the encounters with these entities the most, seeing as how she stays at home with the kids, so I almost began to wonder if she was going crazy until her other son says something eerily shocking,

“I’m scared Mom.”

“Scared of what?”

“Dalton. Can I change rooms?”

“Why would you wanna change rooms?”

“I don’t like when he walks around at night.”

Being that Dalton has been in a coma for months now, there’s no way he could’ve been walking around. So what was the little boy hearing? Evil entities that have manifested physically into our world enough to be able to actually be heard and seen.

You would think that because it seems as though there are other entities making contact that it would have something to do with the house. But when the family moves to a new home and the hauntings keep happening, the family has to assume it’s something other than a simple haunting.

Come to find out it’s a genetic sleep-jumping disorder that allows the host of the body, the person, to move through to an otherworld. In doing so, leaving their body an empty vessel, or portal, for the seemingly evil entities.

I really like this film because I believe that sleep represents freedom for a lot of people. A chance to escape all the horrors that surround you and to rest. Much like Freddy Krueger’s victims in “Nightmare On Elm Street”, there is no escape anymore for the little boy lost in this dark, insidious otherworld.