Movie Review – Insidious: Chapter 3

Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)
Written and directed by Leigh Whanell

After the conclusion of the second film, the story of the Lamberts & their haunting seemed to be over. Yet, Blumhouse wanted another installment. Leigh Whanell returned to write this script, while James Wan moved on to direct Furious 7. A few months into production, it was decided that Whanell would make his directorial debut with Chapter 3, and I can tell you it didn’t inspire confidence in me to learn this fact. Whanell would go on to direct The Invisible Man remake in 2020, which, aside from some clever ideas, just failed in the execution. For a person who has devoted so much of his career to horror, you would think Whanell might just once pull off something actually scary instead of the same level of horror you find in your local seasonal haunted house attraction. 

Smartly realizing Elise (Lin Shaye) is the best part of the franchise, this film is a prequel going back three years before the Lambert haunting. Elise is sought out by Quinn (Stefanie Scott), a teenager who wants to speak with the spirit of her deceased mother. The psychic attempts contact but senses something malevolent, telling Quinn to let the dead rest. The teenage girl goes on with her life but keeps having strange encounters and sensations of being watched, leading to her breaking her legs after being hit by a car while distracted by a figure. 

Quinn’s father, Sean (Dermot Mulroney), realizes his daughter is being haunted and seeks out Elise to help him vanquish the spirit from their apartment. She refuses to get involved in the spirit realm again, but Sean’s son has an idea: call these funny ghost-hunting dudes he watches on YouTube Specs & Tucker (Whanell & Angus Sampson). It becomes evident early on that this duo is out of their depth; however, Elise shows up in deus ex machina style to save Quinn and her family. She also uses the ghost hunters and decides they would make a great team, leading to a conclusion that equivocates to “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” 

As I’ve said in my previous two reviews, Insidious is the most confusing horror franchise I’ve seen. It has some core elements: Elise, Specs & Tucker, The Further. There are aspects directly associated with the Lamberts, specifically The Bride and The Lipstick Demon, that it keeps trying to reincorporate and tie to Elise. In this script, it’s retroactively established that since their encounter in 1986, The Bride has it out for Elise and wants her to die. That is clearly one of these efforts to make things feel more connected, but it feels silly to me. The Bride (inside Josh) kills Elise because she takes a photo of them, not because of a long-standing grudge. Changing this detail doesn’t add much to the series or Elise’s character. A spirit or demon uniquely connected to her would have been better. 

The Lipstick Demon feels linked to Dalton, so using him at the end as a jumpscare doesn’t make sense. He was also aware of Elise and wanted to harm her? That doesn’t track with anything he does any other time he turns up in the series. In the most recent film, The Red Door, we’ll see that he is still directly associated with Dalton. I’m talking about this when I say Insidious has many elements, but none really click together to amount to much more. For a series that seems to hint at the importance of lore (at least, that’s the vibe I get), it does an extremely shit job of developing that lore.

The problem with this third entry is that it starts doing some interesting things with the horror elements but fails with the characters. The scares are not great, and some fall flat, but there are moments when the tension is ratcheted up decently. There are still the problems of how these movies all fit together as a franchise, but on its own, this is okay. Where Whanell stumbles is in writing such bland, generic characters. Quinn and her family are not compelling enough to focus the movie on. Having Quinn as our main character was a regression to 1980s horror, where teenagers were often at the story’s center. The actress is okay, but she’d fit much better in a Disney Channel production than in a horror picture.

Bringing back Elise is good, but the film teases us with her while centering most of the action in Quinn’s apartment. The result is that I found myself drifting off to sleep when Quinn and her family were talking because they are such lifeless characters. Chapter 3 is worse than the first two but scarier than the second entry. It’s such a bizarre thing to witness, a franchise course correcting so hard it breaks itself in a completely new way. Whanell doesn’t seem to know how to write in anything other than cliche. I am convinced that the only people who could be frightened by an Insidious film are middle schoolers or someone who has never watched a horror film. It’s a hair apart from Goosebumps, honestly.

It’s just another hollow jumpscare-fest at the end of the day, a story you will forget almost as soon as the end credits roll. We got more of Lin Shaye, which was nice. She’ll be back, of course, for our following review, a sequel to the prequel, but still a prequel to the original film with The Last Key.