IGN can exclusively debut the first trailer for Insidious: The Red Door, which is billed as “the final chapter of the Lambert family’s terrifying saga.” (You can watch the trailer via the player above or the embed below.) Original cast members Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, and Ty Simpkins are all back for this fifth installment in the Screen Gems-Blumhouse horror franchise, with Wilson also making his feature film directorial debut.
Set roughly a decade after the events of James Wan’s original film, Insidious: The Red Door is a father-son tale about dealing with the trauma of the events depicted in the first two movies. The screenplay is written by Scott Teems from a story by Leigh Whannell, based on characters Whannell created.
“To put their demons to rest once and for all, Josh (Patrick Wilson) and a college-aged Dalton (Ty Simpkins) must go deeper into The Further than ever before, facing their family’s dark past and a host of new and more horrifying terrors that lurk behind the red door,” according to the official synopsis.
In an exclusive phone interview with IGN, Wilson revealed that he was looking for a film to direct for some time when his agent suggested he direct the fifth Insidious. He initially rejected the notion.
“I think I was scared of trying to fit in James' shoes and Leigh’s and gosh, the comparisons. Ultimately, that lasted for about 24 hours,” Wilson recalled. “I started to think about the story and the kind of story that I would want to tell. The more I thought about it, kind of like with acting choices … if a role makes me uneasy and I can't wrap my head around it and it scares me to do it, then usually that's a really good thing. My fear of wanting to step into this genre and specifically back into the Insidious world and take the reins, it lasted about 24 hours.”
Wan – who has so far directed Wilson in the Insidious, Conjuring, and Aquaman franchises – told IGN via email, “I was thrilled to hear Patrick wanted to continue the journey of Insidious as a director. I’ve gotten to know Patrick very well over the years of collaboration, and I know what a film buff he is. He is extremely knowledgeable about cinema and its craft. We would geek out over movies all the time in between our setups, and making movie references on set became our shorthand. So it felt right that he was making the transition into directing, and I couldn’t be happier that he’s doing it with the Insidious franchise.”
Wilson stressed that Insidious: The Red Door “was not a vanity project for me. I had no desire to, oh, just want to direct to see what it's like. I know I can do it, so it wasn't a question of just finding anything to direct. It needed to be something that I believed in and was passionate about because I knew it was going to live with me for several years. I read the synopsis and then crafted, without giving too much away, but crafted this story that I would want to tell about a father-son relationship. What would happen 10 years after you were hypnotized if that either wore off or broke through?”
“I wanted to unpack everything that happened at the end of Insidious 2. I really wanted to finish this Lambert trilogy and I wanted to, again, without giving the storyline away, I wanted to push this generational curse even more. What does that mean? When does a curse become a blessing? Is a blessing a curse?”
In the film, Dalton leaves home for college so Wilson drew on his own experiences as a theater student at Carnegie Mellon to help flesh out Dalton’s journey in the story. ‘Anybody that goes to an arts-related program, you can even think of Whiplash in the music world, what it does to you as a person because it makes you look at not just technically how you play, but who are you as an artist,” Wilson said. “That's something that I wanted to latch onto because artwork and even young Dalton's artwork was really the key in the first movie.”
“I wanted to take all these little breadcrumbs that James had left along the way and [ask] what does that do to a kid in college? I just dove in from there and the generational curses and giving to the relationship of father and son and what that does to their relationship and the aftermath of what happened in Insidious 2. You're dealing with a lot of very heavy subjects, but there's really no better genre to explore that than horror because it really becomes very operatic. That's what I love about horror.”
While the Insidious franchise is known for its infamous jump scares, Wilson wanted to make sure the scares he and his team crafted were all generated from “a very emotional perspective.”
“I certainly wanted to push the envelope to the things that I respond to. I think you want to satisfy the fans with jump scares, but there's an emotional level to this movie because of what they're going through. That's not to take away from any other Insidious movie, but I really wanted to get to the core of these people, specifically Josh and Dalton,” Wilson said.
“They went through some very, very traumatic experiences in the second movie. Very traumatic. I can't help as a father, just in my own life, to know what is the recourse of that. If all that stuff came back to you, it's not just the jump scares that you're mining this field to try to come up with creative scares. This for me started with the story of what's the trauma. What are they dealing with? There's a lot of emotional fallout from the second movie, so that's why I wanted to treat this in a very realistic way. As long as you build on that, yeah, then we can have some crazy scares. But it starts from a very emotional perspective.”
Insidious: The Red Door opens July 7th.
