History Film / InsidIous

** The Dancing Boy scene can be extremely scary, because: 1) It happened during a [[DaylightHorror sunny day]] instead of a dark night. 2) He even hides in the comatose Dalton's room's closet! Imagine if your child is in the same room with an entity from another world. 4) Well, just see the FreezeFrameBonus. Unless your eyes are sharp enough, you probably won't even realize he was there in the first place. 6) This is also the first scene which made the song "Tiptoe through the Tulips" become scary in the film. Later when this song is played again, you know [[OhCrap something bad is going to happen]].

* DaylightHorror:
** The demon first appears to Lorraine [[spoiler: in the front room of the Lamberts' second house]] in the middle of a sunny afternoon.
** Same for Chapter 2 with the Woman in White. She appears to Renai, nearly steals the baby, and knocks her out in the full bright of day.

* StableTimeLoop: Earlier events can be influenced by The Further existing outside of time and space. This leads to twists like [[spoiler: Josh Lambert "helping" his past self, and Elise and company accidentally leaving a door open that kicks off the evens of Chapter 1]].

* AMinorKidroduction:
** ''Chapter 2'' opens with Elise's first meeting with Lorraine and Josh Lambert, the latter still a boy Dalton's age, twenty four years before the events of the first film.
** The opening of ''The Last Key'' is set in 1952, when Elise was still a little girl.

** In the scene where Lorraine recounts her dream about a demon in Dalton's, we see a shadow of the demon that looks similar to a silhouette of [[Franchise/ANightmareOnElmStreet Freddy Krueger]] thanks to the blade-like hands and fedora-like item on their head.

The first film was directed by Creator/JamesWan, Whannell's frequent collaborator and director of the first ''Film/SawI'', and released in 2011 after premiering in a film festival several months earlier. The story centers on the Lambert family, consisting of father Josh (Creator/PatrickWilson), mother Renai (Creator/RoseByrne), and their three children, the oldest being ten-year-old Dalton. As they begin to settle into a new home, they experience strange noises and other unexplained phenomena. Soon Dalton is rushed to the hospital after slipping into a coma shortly after falling off a ladder in the attic. Months slip by, and the doctors still have no explanation for his continuing coma. When the boy is returned home under his mother's care, more frightening events occur in the home. The mother is so horrified that she moves the family to another new home in hopes of leaving the fearful memories behind them.

The original follows a similar formula to the film ''Film/{{Poltergeist|1982}}'' where an evil supernatural force abducts Dalton's spirit for their own ends, except they want to possess his physical body for use on this side rather than keep him and his physical body on the otherside. Similar to ''Poltergiest'', Josh must cross over to the otherside (The Further) and rescue Dalton from his prison only with AstralProjection. Unfortunately, Josh can't imagine what dangers await him in this plane of the dead and an old nemesis from his childhood awaits his arrival.

The third film, ''Insidious: Chapter 3'', is a prequel and was released June 5, 2015. Wan stepped down from the director role (though he remained as a producer for this film and subsequent installments), replaced by Whannell in his directorial debut. The film is set several years before the events of the first film and focuses on Quinn Brenner (Creator/StefanieScott), an aspiring young theater actress who longs to speak with her deceased mother, Lillith. However, her life takes a turn for the worse when a mysterious entity starts to stalk and physically endanger her. Quinn's father (Creator/DermotMulroney) and brother contact Specs and Tucker and a jaded Elise, still recovering from the death of her husband, to help them save Quinn.

The fourth film, titled ''Insidious: The Last Key'', was announced in 2016. It was released on January 5, 2018 and directed by Adam Robitel (''Film/TheTakingOfDeborahLogan''), while Whannell also takes on producing role along with Blum, Peli and Wan. It is an {{Interquel}}, set between the events of the third and first films. Elise has been confronted by nightmares about her past back when she was a girl living in an abusive household in the fictional town of Five Keys, New Mexico, before being contacted by a man living in her former home, claiming it to be haunted. She, along with Specs and Tucker, venture out to find out what's going on and to put Elise's past to rest.

The fifth and final installment, titled ''Insidious: The Red Door'', was released on July 7, 2023. It was directed by Wilson in his directorial debut, with Scott Teems writing the screenplay, based on a story treatment by Whannell. In addition to directing, Wilson reprised his role as Josh alongside Dalton's now-adult actor, Ty Simpkins. The plot picks up a decade after the events of ''Chapter 2'' as Dalton begins college.

* VisitByDivorcedDad: [[spoiler:In ''The Red Door'', Josh, who emotionally estranged himself from Renai and their kids after his divorce, decides to drive Dalton when he begins college. What should have been a heartwarming reconciliation turns nasty when the two end up having a fight. They do not reconcile until near the end of the film, when the return of the Red-Faced Demon forces them to work together.]]

* HappyEndingOverride: ''The Red Door'' effectively undoes the happy ending of ''Chapter 2'' (in which [[spoiler:Josh decides to have his and Dalton's astral projecting abilities be hypnotized away, so they can live normally)]]. The film reveals that [[spoiler:the stress of keeping Josh and Dalton from remembering their experiences while simultaneously preventing Foster from relieving the memory of Josh trying to kill them all led to the breakdown of Josh's and Renai's marriage, and their eventual divorce. Fast forward to nine years later, not only is Josh estranged from his family, he has an especially rocky relationship with Dalton, who has grown up to become a shut-in introvert. Lorraine has died, and Josh struggles to pick up the pieces because his repressed memories are still haunting him. Then the hauntings start coming back...]]

A fifth film (also as the final installment) [[https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3639353/patrick-wilson-directing-fifth-installment-insidious-franchise/ was announced in 2020]], titled ''Insidious: The Red Door'', and was released on July 7, 2023. It was directed by Wilson in his directorial debut, with Scott Teems writing the screenplay, based on a story treatment by Whannell. In addition to directing, Wilson reprised his role as Josh alongside Dalton's now-adult actor, Ty Simpkins. The plot picks up a decade after the events of ''Chapter 2'' as Dalton begins college.

* TwentyMinutesIntoThePast: Most of the events in the films don't veer far from 2010, the year the film was first shown (it had a wide release in 2011). ''Chapter 3'' is set "a few years before the Lambert haunting", so probably 2007 or 2008. Flashbacks do take place very far away (some events in ''Chapter 2'' seem to take place in the early 20th century), but they're, well, flashbacks.

** Gerald Rainier from ''The Last Key''. Good lord. The opening scene shows merely one of the many times he abused Elise - by hitting her with a stick and locking her in the cellar - due to fearing her powers. Elise was [[WouldHurtAChild less than 10 years old]] by this time. [[spoiler: It is later revealed that he was influenced by Key Face, but it doesn't make it any less sickening.]]
*** [[spoiler: Making it worse, he may not have been influenced by Key Face at the time.]]

** The Red-Faced Demon in the first film.
** The sequel has [[spoiler: Parker Crane and his mother Michelle Crane.]]

* CliffhangerWall: ''Chapter 2'' (2013) ends with [[spoiler:Elise (now a ghost) noticing a demonic presence lurking in the dark]]. The next two films ''Chapter 3'' (2015) and ''The Last Key'' (2018) were both prequels leaving the cliffhanger as the last chronological event. However, the fifth film, titled ''The Red Door'' and scheduled for 2023, is set to take place after ''Chapter 2''.

* CruelTwistEnding: [[spoiler:At the end of the first film, Josh turns out to have been possessed by the Bride In Black while trying to escape from The Further, who uses his body to murder Elise. It is somewhat mitigated by the following film.]]

* DisappearedDad: Josh's father is nowhere to be seen. Lorraine was already a single mother when Elise met her for the first time in 1986.

** [[spoiler: The Red Door more then any one in the series ends on a happy note with Josh and Dalton, stopping the demons and also preventing any more supernatural forces from being able to enter their world and torment them. Josh and Dalton reconcile and for that matter Josh seems to be reconciling with the rest of the family. He also gets closure with his deceased /missing father. Finally Elise herself visits Josh briefly telling him he has a great future ahead of him.]]

** [[spoiler: Dalton's ability to astral project was inherited from Josh.]]

* KilledOffscreen: [[spoiler: In ''The Last Key'', the audience is never shown Gerald's death in the real world, possibly due to old age. The irony is that he is probably the only member of the Rainier family that the audience ''[[AbusiveParents wishes]]'' a torturous death.]]

* TraumaCongaLine: Elise's life story is nothing but [[TheChewToy this]]. [[spoiler: When she was a kid, she was emotionally and physically abused by her father, who told her that no one would love someone like her, because he hated and feared her powers. Her mother died because she unwittingly let a demon into their house, something that continues to haunt her into old age, and her father, predictably, blamed her. Years afterward, she finally snapped and ran away from home. While Elise later married Jack and had a good life, that ended when Jack committed suicide. She's coaxed by helping Quinn Brenner to help contact the latter's mother, which almost gets Elise killed. Then when she tries to make amends to her brother after visiting home to search for its haunting ghost, her brother lashes out at her for abandoning him to deal with their father's abuse alone. Her niece almost immediately gets killed by the spirit haunting her childhood home, which turns out to be the same spirit who possessed her abusive father and had him kill and dismember women in their basement.]] She goes through this and [[HopeSpot finally gets closure from her remaining family]]...then she's called by Lorraine Lambert, whose son Elise helped be free of the Bride in Black when he was a boy, to help her haunted grandson Dalton. [[DownerEnding We know how this ends]].

A fifth film (also as the final installment) [[https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3639353/patrick-wilson-directing-fifth-installment-insidious-franchise/ was announced in 2020]], titled ''Insidious: The Red Door'', and is slated to be released on July 7, 2023. It will be directed by Wilson in his directorial debut, with Scott Teems writing the screenplay, based on a story treatment by Whannell. In addition to directing, Wilson will reprise his role as Josh alongside Dalton's now-adult actor, Ty Simpkins. The plot will pick up a decade after the events of ''Chapter 2'' as Dalton begins college.

* TheMaidenNameDebate: Jack's surname in ''Chapter 3'' is stated in the credits to be "Rainier", suggesting that Elise adopted his surname after marriage. But ''The Last Key'' reveals that "Rainier" is Elise's surname from birth, meaning that he adopted her surname (or by some coincidence, they both had the same surname without being related).

* TheMaidenNameDebate: Jack's surname in ''Chapter 3'' is stated in the credits to be "Rainier", suggesting that Elise adopted his surname after marriage. But ''The Last Key'' reveals that "Rainier" is Elise's surname from birth, meaning that he adopted her surname.

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: Elise, when she finds out that [[spoiler: the black-haired woman in she encountered her house as a teenager wasn't a ghost, but was very much alive and was trying to escape from the basement. Elise assumed she was another mangled spirit and didn't try to help her.]]

A fifth film [[https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3639353/patrick-wilson-directing-fifth-installment-insidious-franchise/ was announced in 2020]], titled ''Insidious: Fear The Dark'', and is slated to be released on July 7, 2023. It will be directed by Wilson in his directorial debut, with Scott Teems writing the screenplay, based on a story treatment by Whannell. In addition to directing, Wilson will reprise his role as Josh alongside Dalton's now-adult actor, Ty Simpkins. The plot will pick up a decade after the events of ''Chapter 2'' as Dalton begins college.

A fifth film [[https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3639353/patrick-wilson-directing-fifth-installment-insidious-franchise/ was announced in 2020]], and is slated to be released on July 7, 2023. It will be directed by Wilson in his directorial debut, with Scott Teems writing the screenplay, based on a story treatment by Whannell. In addition to directing, Wilson will reprise his role as Josh alongside Dalton's now-adult actor, Ty Simpkins. The plot will pick up a decade after the events of ''Chapter 2'' as Dalton begins college.

** In an allusion to James Wan and Leigh Whannell's past career, a chalk drawing of Billy the Puppet from ''Franchise/{{Saw}}'' can be seen in the blackboard at the scene where Josh sits behind his teacher's desk.

** In a scene where we see Josh behind his teacher's desk in the classroom, the face drawn in chalk on the blackboard is the puppet from ''Franchise/{{Saw}}''.
** In the scene where Lorraine recounts her dream about a demon in Dalton's, we see a shadow of the demon that looks similar to a silhouette of [[Franchise/ANightmareOnElmStreet Freddy Kruger]] thanks to the blade-like hands and fedora-like item on their head.

A fifth film [[https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3639353/patrick-wilson-directing-fifth-installment-insidious-franchise/ was announced in 2020]] and will be directed by Wilson in his directorial debut, with Scott Teems writing the screenplay, based on a story treatment by Whannell. In addition to directing, Wilson will reprise his role as Josh alongside Dalton's now-adult actor, Ty Simpkins. The plot will pick up a decade after the events of ''Chapter 2'' as Dalton begins college.

** The Dancing Boy scene can be extremely scary, because: 1) It happened during a [[DaylightHorror sunny day]] instead of a dark night. 2) He even hides in the comatose Dalton's room's closet! Imagine if your child is in the same room with an entity from another world. Doubles with AdultFear. 4) Well, just see the FreezeFrameBonus. Unless your eyes are sharp enough, you probably won't even realize he was there in the first place. 6) This is also the first scene which made the song "Tiptoe through the Tulips" become scary in the film. Later when this song is played again, you know [[OhCrap something bad is going to happen]].

* AdultFear:
** A lot of the first movie runs on this - your child being injured and screaming while you have no idea where he is, in an unfamiliar home; same child [[spoiler: falling into a coma after you dismiss his head injury]]; the door being broken open, chain snapped and alarm blaring seconds after you check that no one is outside; strange people appearing in your children's rooms and disappearing just as quickly as they came...
** In ''Chapter 2'', once again the baby monitor picks up speech from the baby's room. This time however, the door slams shut with the ghost inside, and when it finally opens the child is nowhere to be found.
** ''The Last Key'' has not one, but two:
*** Your daughter has a power that you don't understand, which also makes her the target of physical and emotional lashing by your husband. [[spoiler: And you die, leaving your daughter and her brother to endure years of lashing from your husband, while you can only watch helplessly from the afterlife.]]
*** The second one starts out similarly: one of your daughters has a power that you don't understand and makes you frightened. But only not because it tends to attract terror; [[spoiler: but also because the same power also appeared in your older sister, whom you were taught to shun by your father. A few days after your sister returns, your other daughter suffers an injury that modern medicine isn't able to cure...]]

The first film was directed by Creator/JamesWan, Whannell's frequent collaborator and director of the first ''Film/{{Saw}}'', and released in 2011 after premiering in a film festival several months earlier. The story centers on the Lambert family, consisting of father Josh (Creator/PatrickWilson), mother Renai (Creator/RoseByrne), and their three children, the oldest being ten-year-old Dalton. As they begin to settle into a new home, they experience strange noises and other unexplained phenomena. Soon Dalton is rushed to the hospital after slipping into a coma shortly after falling off a ladder in the attic. Months slip by, and the doctors still have no explanation for his continuing coma. When the boy is returned home under his mother's care, more frightening events occur in the home. The mother is so horrified that she moves the family to another new home in hopes of leaving the fearful memories behind them.

The second film, ''Insidious: Chapter 2'', was released on September (Friday the) 13th, 2013 and once again directed by Wan. It follows the fallout of the first film as the Lamberts try to move on from their previous experiences by moving to the residence of Josh's mother, Lorraine (Creator/BarbaraHershey). However, it's soon made clear that the haunting has not yet stopped and in fact increases by a magnitude. The family race through time trying to discover the truth behind it and determine what connection it has with Josh, who seems to become the new target of haunting.

The third film, ''Insidious: Chapter 3'', is a prequel and was released June 5, 2015. Wan stepped down from the director role, replaced by Whannell. The film is set several years before the events of the first film and focuses on Quinn Brenner (Creator/StefanieScott), an aspiring young theater actress who longs to speak with her deceased mother, Lillith. However, her life takes a turn for the worse when a mysterious entity starts to stalk and physically endanger her. Quinn's father (Creator/DermotMulroney) and brother contact Specs and Tucker and a jaded Elise, still recovering from the death of her husband, to help them save Quinn.

The fourth film, titled ''Insidious: The Last Key'', was announced in 2016. It was released on January 5, 2018 and directed by Adam Robitel (''Film/TheTakingOfDeborahLogan''). It is an {{Interquel}}, set between the events of the third and first films. Elise has been confronted by nightmares about her past back when she was a girl living in an abusive household in the fictional town of Five Keys, New Mexico, before being contacted by a man living in her former home, claiming it to be haunted. She, along with Specs and Tucker, venture out to find out what's going on and to put Elise's past to rest.

A fifth film [[https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3639353/patrick-wilson-directing-fifth-installment-insidious-franchise/ was announced in 2020]] and will be directed by Wilson, who will reprise his role as Josh alongside Dalton's now-adult actor, Ty Simpkins. The plot will pick up a decade after the events of ''Chapter 2'' as Dalton begins college.

* BadassBeard: Tucker, the tall paranormal team member, has one.

** [[spoiler: The ending to the ''The Last Key'' suggests that Elise was inadvertently responsible for the events of Chapters 1 and 2, including her own death, by leaving the red door in the Lambert's attic open through The Further, allowing the Red-Faced Demon to come through for Dalton.]]