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.

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.