Insidious: The Red Door (2023) – Don’t Knock

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 6th July
Seen: 18th October

For 13 years now, Insidious has been one of the biggest franchises in all of horror. What started as a way for James Wan and Leigh Whannell to prove that they could scare an audience without the gore that their Saw franchise became known for turned into a bona fide iconic franchise of its own that has spread out over multiple sequels, some telling the story of the Lambert family who end up entangled with spirits from another world while others focus on Elise Rainier, the medium who helped the Lambert family and who dealt with hauntings of her own. Like almost all horror series, the longer this franchise has gone on the more it has started slowly circling the drain so the question is how far down that drain is Insidious: The Red Door… about where it was last time, and last time I begged for them to stop this franchise so you can guess what this one made me feel. 

Actually you don’t have to guess, read on.

Insidious: The Red Door returns the focus of the franchise back onto the Lambert family who have dealt with their past trauma in the best possible way… by having the father Josh (Patrick Wilson) and son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) get their memories suppressed (this happened at the end of Insidious: Chapter Two but that was a decade ago so fortunately this film reminds the audience of that in a flashback). Now Josh and Dalton are estranged due to a separation between Josh and Renai (Rose Byrne) but Josh is still trying so he drives Dalton to college. At college, Dalton is taking an art class and for some reason keeps drawing a large red door, something that feels like it came directly out of his childhood. 

Oops, turns out that Dalton has, somehow, started remembering the things he suppressed and now is regularly slipping back into the dark realm that appears in all of these movies, meaning Dalton (and eventually Josh) is being treated to such terrifying sights as “a dead guy puking” and “Burned guy with red face paint”, Josh is going to have to relearn astral projecting to go save his son before something truly scary happens, like another sequel.

Look, by this point in the Insidious franchise you should pretty much know what you’re in for. Several scenes of character development (or as close to it as we can get) followed by scenes that include a colour filter and the smoke machine going on full, a few creepy things happening in the darkness and a loud scream that makes the audience jump. There are no new scares here, it’s all the same scares that anyone who is into this franchise has seen nearly half a dozen times already.

Sure some of the scares might be effective, turns out that Patrick Wilson has actually got a knack for directing this genre and I hope he does more of it, but most of the time you can see the scares coming a mile off because we know how this franchise works. There’s nothing new or creative in Insidious: The Red Door, at least by the time slasher franchises get to a 5th entry they might come up with weird ways to behead someone but this expects the same demon from the first movie to have the same impact and he just doesn’t.

Hell, just about everything about Insidious: The Red Door is wildly predictable, you know how this has to end and what is bound to happen because you’ve seen four movies just like it. Hell, I joked on Twitter (I refuse to call it by its new name, Twitter is the only thing that’s acceptable to deadname) before I watched Insidious: The Red Door using a Rolling Stones reference and my joke ended up actually calling out the ending of the film, that’s how goddamn predictable it is. It’s just all been done before, it’s not new nor does it add that much. 

The story of the Lambert family was done, they were freed from the demon and we had all moved on to enjoying the new adventures of Elise (who, by the way, is in a cameo at the end of Insidious: The Red Door and nothing more) so to bring the Lamberts back to undo all their progress just to repeat stuff we’ve seen before feels wrong. It’s a regression that this franchise didn’t need and worst of all it’s a regression that really doesn’t do much with the returning cast. At best we learn that the events of the first two movies led to the main couple separating and they’re trying to navigate a new family dynamic, but it feels mostly like some actors had a lot less time available to film and they needed to justify why they weren’t around for most of the action. It’s just all pointless in ways that it shouldn’t be.

The kindest thing that can be said is that it’s clear Patrick Wilson has talent as a director, despite him working with a script that retreads old familiar material he manages to handle it well and you can tell that he could make something truly great with the right material. It’s certainly not the greatest debut ever but hey, Elizabeth Banks had a less than stellar debut too and she ended up giving us Cocaine Bear so maybe Patrick Wilson has his own Cocaine Bear in him somewhere and I hope he can let it out sometime.

Insidious: The Red Door really just shows that there is probably no more actual life in this franchise, at least in terms of creativity. It’s done everything that it can do with this concept, it’s played all its cards and now it’s just doing laps for no reason and expecting applause out of it. It’s not nearly as scary as it used to be, it might be time to lock the door and walk away before it gets really sad.