Barbara Hershey, Patrick Wilson, Ty Simpkins and Rose Byrne as the Lamberts. (Matt Kennedy/Film District)

Director James Wan’s 2004 breakout Saw helped usher in a world of torture porn. This summer he hit a career high with The Conjuring, an excellent marriage of tight script (by twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes) and disciplined filmmaking. John Leonetti’s camerawork followed a controlled strategy that established a solid, steady foundation before gradually turning the viewer on their head and finally letting all Hell break loose. But was The Conjuring a fluke?

Viewers who have not seen Insidious should stop reading here. You need the first one under your belt to appreciate what little there is to appreciate here. The first Insidious, like The Conjuring, is a variation on a time-honored horror trope: real estate anxiety. The Lamberts (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson) and their two young boys move into an old house whose Victorian creaks take on a terribly sinister meaning. As the first chapter unfolds, it is revealed that the problem is coming not from inside the house but from INSIDE THAT LITTLE KID (Ty Simpkins), who has the gift of projecting himself into The Further, a netherworld of tortured spirits. This gift is inherited from his father Josh (Wilson), who had his own traumatic journeys through The Further when he was his son’s age. As Insidious ends, Josh, whose body has been inhabited by what is apparently a female demon, has strangled paranormal investigator Elise (Lin Shaye) and is stuck in The Further.

Chapter 2 begins with a flashback to young Josh and his psychic misadventures, and it is mildly entertaining to compare and contrast the actors cast as younger versions of characters from Insidious. Lindsay Seim plays the young Elise, and affects the same stiff delivery that Shaye brings to the character. Jocelin Donahue plays Josh’s mother Lorraine, standing in as a younger Barbara Hershey, and I spent the movie’s first minutes mentally extrapolating the shape of her lips with Hershey’s failing collagen implants. What a clever bit of reverse-engineering casting, I thought. That is not a thought that should pass through your mind when you’re watching an effective horror movie.

Danielle Bisutti as Mommie Dearest (Matt Kennedy/Film District)

The first Insidious was a decent modern horror movie, but despite the return of the original cast, the script (by frequent Wan collaborator Leigh Whannell, who also appears in the film) is dull and obvious. Insidious: Chapter 2 does some clever things with footage from the first film, but fails to reprise one of its more effective and creepy elements: the use of Tiny Tim’s version of “Tiptoe through the Tulips.” It’s in the sequel’s trailer, but it’s not in the movie.

The movie has a couple of cheap jump-in-your-seat moments, and a creepy set-piece in an abandoned hospital. But what you’re left with is authentic Victorian detail and comic relief, some of it unintentional. The scariest thing about the movie was the audience at the press screening I attended, when a scene of violence against women was received with an approving roar of laughter.

One of the paranormal investigators assigned to the Lambert case holds a fast food apple pie in one scene. The pie is not branded, but the sight of that familiar baked pastry shape immediately made me hungry for a [redacted] apple pie. Such subtle product placement is the most insidious thing in the movie.

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Insidious :Chapter 2
Directed by James Wan
Written by Leigh Whannel
With Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of terror and violence, thematic elements and bad plastic surgery
Opens today at a multiplex near you