“People think that it’s just fun and games out here scaring people, but it is a lot of work.”

“The first time I saw them, I saw there was an ominosity, if that’s a word, to them,” actor Jason Miller said in the documentary.

With Insidious, James Wan and his longtime co-writer Leigh Whannell once again resolutely refuse to reinvent the wheel, drawing on sources from classic gothic haunted-house horror to creepy modern haunting touchstones like The Entity and Poltergeist. But even wearing all those influences proudly on its sleeve, Insidious works on its own merits, because Wan knows that what we want is to be scared, and that images glimpsed, suggested, or hinted at are orders of magnitude more unsettling than buckets of blood and viscera.