From the Big Screen to Your TV Screen: Insdious DVD Review

As you all know by now,  Insidious wasn’t the generic haunted house story with a nice little family in their nice little home that is also inhabited by some generic evil force that leaves you thinking “Why didn’t they just move out of the house?” No, Insidious takes it a step further by saying that it’s actually the child that’s haunted. Alright, not too bad, but that seems like it’s been done before as well, and that’s where Insidious really succeeds. It goes way beyond the story about a little boy with some nasty spirits following him around. It takes you to a realm beyond anything you've ever seen before and introduces us to the paranormal phenomena known as astral projection, a subject that remained untouched by horror films before Insidious.

Well, Insidious is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray so that you can take the horror home with you.

Insidious was the sleeper hit of the year, and is one of the best modern horror films out there right now, so the DVD release was very exciting for genre fans. The first thing I always do when I first buy a new DVD is check out the Special Features. There's not a single horror film in my collection with commentaries I haven't listened to, deleted scenes I haven't watched, interviews I haven't heard and behind the scenes features I haven't viewed. I love my movies, and want to know everything there is to know about them, so Insidious was no exception. Although there unfortunately is no commentary on the initial release, there were some impressive extras.

The first is a selection titled Horror 101: The Exclusive Seminar. This feature explained James Wan and Leigh Whannell's writing process during the creation of Insidious. Leigh Whannell mentioned that he wanted no "false scares" in his film, and avoided jump scares that ended up being the cat jumping out from behind the door or some other phoney attempt to get the audience's attention. James Wan also mentioned that while creating the movie, he wanted to make a film that would bring the horror home after people left the theater and returned to their own house. He surely succeeded in doing this and said that this is why he used such familiar settings in the familiar, "We all live in a house or place that we think of as our sanctuary".  Another note that writer Leigh Whannell added was that he wanted to the end sequence in the demon's lair to be very Argento-esque and inspired by Italian horror films, hence the red and black color theme.

The next section of Insidious' Special Features is called On Set with Insidious. This feature is (obviously) a behind the scenes look at the actual making of and production on the set of the film. The main point made during this feature was that "Making horror films is fun!" and that the cast, crew, director and writer all had incredible chemistry through out the entire process of making the movie. Also, Wan stated that they wanted to implement the use of practical film making as much as possible. Meaning that he wanted as much as possible to be done in front of the camera and not created later using CGI. This is something that automatically earns my respect with any film which is why film makers such as Quentin Tarantino always impress me. CGI is a curse on horror films that is slowly infecting the movies and getting rid of the real hard work that older directors and crews had to use before all of this computer technology could just replace practical special effects.

The last special feature on the Insidious DVD is a section titled Insidious Entities and talks about the ghosts and ghouls in the film. James Wan had certain characters and place purposely look and feel scarier than others. One very interesting story from this section was the origin of the Long-Haired Fiend (played by J LaRose). Supposedly this character originated from the paranormal experience of a friend of Wan and Whannell's. This friend claims to have woken up in the middle of the night to see a long-haired man in a trench coat pacing back and forth in front of his door. Creepy stuff.

Insidious will go down as a classic horror film in years to come. The DVD has some great special features that explain a lot about what went into the making of the film, however, I would've liked to have seen a commentary by Wan and Whannell (maybe on the inevitable special edition release?). So go out and pick up Insidious quickly before it sells out!