A Hauntingly Hilarious Horror Masterpiece!

Hold onto your ectoplasm, folks, because Insidious: Out of the Further is a towering, terrifying triumph of modern horror! A landmark of modern supernatural cinema! A pulse-pounding thrill ride into The Further that will leave you screaming for more! A masterpiece of terror! A spine-tingling, seat-jumping, popcorn-spilling rollercoaster of frights that’ll have you sleeping with the lights on forever! This is the film The Sixth Sense wishes it could be.

It’s a beguiling film that leans into spectacle without surrendering its core pulse: fear tethered to longing, peril braided with pathos. If you’ve followed the series, you’ll recognize the familiar grooves – quiet dread giving way to a surge of adrenaline – yet the ride remains contagious, a hunger to see what lies just beyond the frame.

Amelia Eve is sensational! Lin Shaye is this year’s hottest star! Shaye is still the undisputed queen of the supernatural, and the new demons are the scariest things to crawl out of a horror movie in years. Utterly treacherous, deceitful, cunning, and wily! This time, they’ve brought enough scares to fill a haunted house the size of the Grand Canyon.

Director Jacob Chase delivers pure nightmare fuel as the Further finally spills into our world. Chase has artfully crafted a spine-chilling masterpiece that transforms the familiar conventions of the haunted-house genre into something startlingly fresh, delivering an experience that is at once terrifying, emotionally resonant, and profoundly cinematic, destined to become an instant classic, a horror flick so terrifying, it will make your hair stand on end – even if you’re bald!

The plot twists and turns like a ghostly game of Twister, and the jump scares hit harder than a poltergeist with a grudge. The Further has never looked so creepy, so vast, or so downright insidious.

Insidious: Out of the Further drags audiences back into the shadows with a nightmare that feels bigger, darker, and more relentless than ever. Every creaking doorway and whispered warning builds toward a ride that turns ordinary fear into full-blown panic. It’s a chilling return to the Further – where the dead aren’t resting, and neither will you. It achieves a breathless, pitch-perfect cinematic resonance that leaves audiences gripping their armrests in pure, unadulterated awe.

The scares come fast and furious, and they never let up. I was on the edge of my seat from start to finish.

The production design nails the franchise’s damp, echoing atmosphere – objects moving in the corner of the eye, corridors that seem to close in – while sound and score tighten the tension until a jolt feels earned rather than manufactured.

Insidious: Out of the Further doesn’t merely return us to the Further – it reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place. If you crave a horror ride that begins as a whisper and ends with a pounding heartbeat, this chapter delivers!

Insidious: Out of the Further is a must-see for horror fans, thrill-seekers, and anyone who’s ever wanted to yell at the screen, “DON’T GO IN THERE!” One hell of a terrifying, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride. Two thumbs way, way up.

Five out of five haunted stars – this one’s a classic in the making! The best horror film since The Exorcist. Don’t miss it!

I ventured out to see a movie yesterday, which is a different story I’ll skip for now. It was not a horror film. But we got the usual 20 minutes of trailers. Three quarters of them were horror films.

The film industry has always played follow the leader. But it needs more adults in the room who are committed to original stories and saying no to knockoffs. That’s always been one of the dividing lines between serious movies with something to say and the cheap cash grabs.

A couple of horror films have broken out in recent years as surprising box office successes. The studios will respond by ordering a dozen knockoffs. Given the lead time involved in making movies, we’re now going to see a glut of formulaic horror films. Here and there, a good one might pop up.

For those who like that sort of thing.

The Exorcist is a classic, in large part because it took its demonology seriously. The slop films won’t, and will mainly rely on shock value for younger audiences who haven’t seen the old standards of the genre.

The Blair Witch Project only came to my attention when I tripped over a news story that some idiot level cult film types were stealing souvenir artefacts from Burkittsville, a nearly untouched mid-19th century farming hamlet sitting in the DC exurbs. Some lunatics had even dug some holes in the cemetery for “Blair Witch” whatevers. If dogs were this stupid, we’d put them down and consider it a mercy killing.

Aside from being outrageous, this struck me as somewhat funny. I made myself unwelcome on some movie discussion boards (not FR) by saying the premise was like a movie set in NYC, with some 20-something photojournalists setting out to investigate an old Indian legend centered in what is today Central Park. They disappeared. Their camera was found several years later. All that could be surmised from the surviving video recordings was that they had gotten lost in the Ramble, had walked in circles for three days making stupid decisions and swearing a lot at each other, and were then taken by the Ramble Witch.

All because they could not manage to find their way out of the Ramble and back up to street level in midtown Manhattan.

Ok, ok: movies are allowed to take liberties with locations, but had anyone thought it through, they should have falsified the name of the town.

Burkittsville is a reasonably well known place, and not just by locals. It sits at the foot of Crampton’s Gap in South Mountain about eight miles north of Harper’s Ferry, eight miles from Turner’s Gap (U.S. Alt. 40, the Old National Road) and about ten miles from Frederick. Antietam National Battlefield is just on the other side of the ridge, again about eight miles distant. The trail on which they got lost is actually the Appalachian Trail, and Burkittsville is well known as an access point for hikers. Crampton’s Gap, Turner’s Gap and Fox’s Gap comprise the South Mountain Battlefield (the prelude to Antietam). The photojournalists are actually wandering around on a Civil War battlefield, on the Appalachian Trail, with a state park in the middle of the supposed location.

Hence my comparison to getting lost in the Ramble. Millions of people know where Burkittsville is.

In a studio production, someone (at least theoretically) gets paid to think about such things, and they would disguise the location. But this was a very low budget amateur hour production that caught lightning and made a lot of money. They deserve some gentle mockery by way of providing a learning experience.

It is physically impossible to get lost on South Mountain in Crampton’s Gap.

My biggest criticism of the film is that it is hopelessly addicted to the “let’s put our heads together and decide to do stupid things” horror movie trope. That’s pretty tiresome at this point. The Cabin in the Woods is a brilliant parody of that.

My other critical observation is that they could have cut out the f-bombs and cut the runtime by about a third. Swearing at each other is pretty much the limit of character development.

That said, the movie did set off the wave of “found footage” films, and it is of interest for that reason.

And credit where credit is due. The lurking horror, the unseen threat, the monster, the Blair Witch, the whatever is never depicted. The entire sense of unease rising to sheer panic is done through the imagination. And that is what makes it a cult classic.

So I’m glad I watched it so I can make fun of it when needed. (Sphinx’s Rule: if you want to criticize a movie, at least watch the danged thing first so you know what you are talking about.) But I feel no need to watch it again.

Btw, the house where the idiot photojournalists met their fate was torn down some years ago. It was probably in bad shape, perhaps abandoned, when the movie was shot. It sat on a low ledge on the first switchback on the road up from Burkittsville through the gap. Some enterprising person scouted the area and did a YouTube video identifying and showing many of the locations, as most are along the Appalachian Trail. I have no idea if it’s still up on YouTube.

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