It is hard to find horror films nowadays that do not automatically resort to using excessive gore, violence or other exploitative measures to "scare" an audience. And given director James Wan's previous horror outings (Saw and Dead Silence) it is easy to understand why the audience might have expected the same kind of results with his latest effort, Insidious.
Surprisingly enough though, Insidious was able to not only scare the audience without the blood and gore but keep them involved in the story/plot as well. Wan was able to keep the audience on edge by slowly building the tension, giving away just enough story-wise to make the audience wonder what was keeping Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai's (Rose Byrne) son Dalton in a coma or why he and the family were being plagued by evil spirits while at the same time making them scoot just a little closer to the edge of their seats whenever they thought they saw a shadow or Renai thought she heard a noise. It's those kinds of scares/jumps that are legitimately effective as they are things an audience member could experience and maybe even wonder, "was it just the wind or something else?" There were some scares/jumps that could make even the most harden horror film viewer shiver, including one particular scene which was shown in the trailer for the film but still caused goose pimples to run up and down one's spine. Beyond the things that went bump in the night the cast was successful in drawing the audience in emotionally and making them care about what was happening on screen (another rarity for a horror film).
Insidious was a good old-fashioned horror film that did not require buckets of blood or other nastiness to deliver some genuine scares.
Grade: B-
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