"You’ll never want to dream again!!"

Horror films typically fall into two categories.  On one hand, you’ve got the blood and guts horrors along the lines of the ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel’ series, and on the other the more psychological horrors like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’.  Whilst being entirely different, both styles of horror are equally capable of achieving the same goal – scaring the pants off the audience.

The omens (no pun intended) bode well for ‘Insidious’ – amongst it’s executive team it can count the writers, producers and directors of both ‘Saw’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’, so if anyone can make a successful horror it’s gonna be these guys.

First off, ‘Insidious’ is no gore fest – it’s firmly in the ‘what you can’t see can most definitely can kill you in the most horrific way possible’ category.  Now it’s not exactly perfect – in fact the end sequence is really a bit of a let down, but the fact of the matter is that more than once I literally almost jumped out of my seat. 

One element of ‘Insidious’ that I really enjoyed was the use of humour to lull the audience into a false sense of security.  I can’t recall how many times the film built the tension, delivered on the scare, and then brought the audience right back down to normality with humour before the whole sequence started again – it was an absolutely brilliant way to ensure that each and every scare hit the mark.

Despite its flaws, ‘Insidious’ achieves the ‘Holy Grail’ of horror movies – it’s actually pretty bloody scary.  It’s not quite up there with the best – I found that the terror was pretty much confined to the cinema rather than following me home, but it’s existence cannot be denied, and that’s good enough for me.