[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1YbOMDI59k&w=640&h=390]

I’ve long been a horror fan (yeah, I know you know) and whenever I see a new ghost story hitting the theaters, I have a hard time resisting. Obviously I had to see Insidious.

And it’s not half bad. It gets a lot of things right, actually. I’ll even recommend it to other fans of the haunted house horror sub-genre. It’s fun, there are a ton of good jump scares that actually have a payoff, and while a good bit of the ending is completely predictable the way it plays out is satisfying enough.

Insidious does a few things right. Beyond the cheesy title card, it starts with and maintains a creepy atmosphere replete with the all the appropriate jumps and bangs and mysteriously threatening figures that the haunted house genre requires. It’s also shamelessly self aware, beginning with said title card and carrying through various nods to almost every classic ghost film ever. They don’t stop at the obvious references to Poltergeist and The Exorcist. No, these guys know their genre. Poltergeist, The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, The Entity, Carnival of Souls… the list goes on but I don’t want to ruin the fun of spotting them all for yourself.

Where it falls short is the same place where most of these genre films begin to unravel. It’s in the overt exposition, the moment when the bumps in the night, flickering lights, and mysterious shadows are no longer enough. It’s when the filmmakers stop the story to tell us what’s going on.

What makes an old house creepy? It’s in the creaking stairs, the figure barely glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, the cold drafts, the odd smell… in short, it’s in the unknown and the unexplained. Once you realize that the weird noise in the cellar is simply the heat kicking on or the cold spot is a drafty window, the mystery is gone and there’s nothing much more to be scared of.

The explanation in the ghost story is tantamount to fixing that busted window. The cold spots go away. The monster in the closet isn’t as frightening once he comes into full view and you notice immediately the bad latex mask, the silly fake teeth, or the make-up design that I’ve heard more than one person compare to Darth Maul. Our imagination is where fear is born and once we’re no longer required to do the work, there’s not nearly as much to be afraid of.

It happens in Insidious just as it happens in so many genre films. The tension is built to levels almost unendurable and then… we’re told what the problem is. We’re shown monsters and overly designed sets and suddenly the screeching violin is garish rather than terrifying.

Even in the excess of the finale, Wan and Whannel’s sensibility remains fun if overtaken by the outlandish. To be completely honest, the only moment that truly bothered me enough to take me out of the film in a negative way is when they resort to the shaky camera, jittery fast ghost figure fight scene. I didn’t like it when it was being done in the William Castle remakes of the late 90’s and I don’t really like it now. Otherwise there’s a sense of the surreal that also infiltrates their earlier Saw collaboration (the weird puppet guy being the perfect visual example). I’m on the fence about whether I think the visual design of the ghosts is more scary or silly, it’s a little bit of both, but that’s more personal preference than anything else. Some people while find them terrifying. Others stupid. C’est la vie.

Otherwise I jumped and cursed at the appropriate moments, I was gleefully delighted by the cheap thrills or the clever allusions, and I was only moderately bothered when they went a little too far in tipping their hat to Poltergeist. It’s a fine line between homage and rip off. The third act of Insidious comes dangerously close to crossing it.

So I don’t know. I wish they had shown less, left more for us to imagine. It’s one thing that Poltergeist, The Exorcist, et al, do so well and it’s what has made them so classic. Sure, in Poltergeist we see the huge monster thing in the closet but what we never know is what happens when Mom crosses over to find the lost Carol Anne. What does that other side look like? Whatever horror our imagination can create.