Insidious

James Wan cancels his own premise at the midpoint. It opens as a haunted house picture, then declares the house innocent and the child the doorway, so moving house changes nothing, which reads as clever or as cheating. The shift of texture in the back half is a shift of building: the family homes were ordinary Los Angeles houses in Victoria Park and Carthay, while the realm the father enters was shot inside the disused Herald Examiner building downtown. Wan kept his cast from meeting Joseph Bishara, who plays the demon, until the camera ran, so those reactions are first contact. Bishara also wrote the score. His makeup covered nose, body paint, lenses, hooves and claws, running five hours; the music he built from a string quartet, a piano and a gutted piano soundboard a friend found abandoned in an alley. On hearing Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” he told Leigh Whannell it was among the creepiest songs he knew and belonged in a serial killer film; Whannell had no idea where to put it. A good fit if you accept frights that are loud and front loaded, and want the back half to trade realism for a set made of light. Not a fit if you want the house itself to be the villain, an idea revoked halfway.