This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
The Insidious movies have always been near and dear to me. From my earliest memories, the first horror movies I watched were Friday the 13th: A New Blood and Insidious. I watched the first with my sister and my aunt on vacation and I remember not being able to sleep that night.
It wasn’t the first or frankly the best paranormal horror movie, but it really resonated with me. Even with the sequels I kept coming back to them. So now the franchise has come to an end, and I’ll say it was a fine conclusion.
Patrick Wilson is making his directorial debut with The Red Door after being our leading man through the first 2 movies. His style fit right into what I was expecting for an Insidious movie for better and for worse. It felt like it fit right into the early 2010s which is good for the franchise but poor as a movie in 2023. At their best, they are scary soap operas, which this was. It has some decent emotional beats to it
The scares were effective, albeit repetitive as most of them were either a misdirect or a cut to something after looking at Dalton’s face. But there were more subtle moments that got me tensed up though. As someone who had to get frequent MRIs done as a child, I’m glad that one of my fears got to make it onto the big screen.
The story we get in Insidious: The Red Door ends up being kind of shallow. Dalton is going away to art school and he and Josh (Patrick Wilson) start putting the pieces of the memories back together after it being erased at the end of Chapter 2. As they do the demons of their past come back to haunt them. While the ending was sweet, the resolution to the conflict felt very flat. There was almost a deeper ending, but they chose against it.
Yet I still enjoyed myself while watching the movie. Maybe it was just getting to see this family back again, but I was looking forward to seeing this movie. It wasn’t as scary as some of the other entries, but I was more interested in Dalton and Josh’s stories.
Final Thoughts
I am glad that Insidious: The Red Door was made and I’m glad Patrick Wilson got to helm it. Is it my favorite of the franchise? No, but I have seen worse horror movies this year. It is, however, a perfectly fine horror movie that wraps up a franchise that helped me become the horror movie fan I am today. It makes me so happy to see that this movie is having success at the box office. I love to see the people that made this franchise what it is rewarded for it.
