☆☆☆
So, on Friday, I watched Insidious with the movie group. Can't remember if I've mentioned them before - there's a small group of people from 
aphanon_meme who gets together once a week, usually on Fridays, to watch horror movies.
witchgif is usually the host - she's a swell gal.
Anyway, this week's film was Insidious.
This is a "demon possession" type of horror film, but it did a few things slightly different from what I usually see, and those differences made it interesting. This film also had Lin Shaye in it; she was also in Ouija, and was one of the few good things about that film. I enjoyed her character here, too - she plays a medium who works with a pair of two geeky ghostbusters.
One thing that I liked was that while the overall tone of the movie was serious-scary (rather than campy horror), it didn't shy away from having its funny moments. The humour hit the right note for me more often than it fell flat, and I like that. A lot of the time, I find that horror films either lean toward too serious, or too silly; this one was just right.
One thing that I found really interesting was the use of astral projection as a plot device. I haven't seen that used much before. Generally what I've seen is that the human character is in their body while the ghost/demon/etc attempts to posses them. Here, the battle isn't happening in the mind; it's happening literally Somewhere Else.
The "somewhere else", or The Further as it's called in the film, reminded me a little of the Dungeon Dimensions in Discworld. But that's just an unrelated thought.
Anyway - the "beyond" concept has the potential to be handled in a really cheesy way, but I think that it was done very well here. The parts leading up to the descent into The Further were more scary than what happened inside of it, but it was still done in a way that was coherent and worked for what the movie was going for.
There are a few places where the film fails for me, though. Many of the incidents in The Further could have been prevented. The father (who goes there via astral projection to rescue his son) should have listened to the warnings that the Medium gave him, rather than ignoring them. Stuff where characters need to do stupid shit in order to move the plot always annoy me.
Secondly, we see too much of the monster. I find that with this kind of thing, it's more ideal to severely limit the amount that the supernatural creature is seen; otherwise, it's less effective at creating the sense of terror.
Overall, though, I think it was a pretty good movie. There were some moments that I felt were genuinely scary. Not in the "gave me nightmares" sense, but in the "holy shit" sense, if that makes any... sense.
This entry was originally posted at http://yuuago.dreamwidth.org/3380621.html. You can comment here or at the original entry.
aphanon_meme who gets together once a week, usually on Fridays, to watch horror movies.
witchgif is usually the host - she's a swell gal.
Anyway, this week's film was Insidious.
This is a "demon possession" type of horror film, but it did a few things slightly different from what I usually see, and those differences made it interesting. This film also had Lin Shaye in it; she was also in Ouija, and was one of the few good things about that film. I enjoyed her character here, too - she plays a medium who works with a pair of two geeky ghostbusters.
One thing that I liked was that while the overall tone of the movie was serious-scary (rather than campy horror), it didn't shy away from having its funny moments. The humour hit the right note for me more often than it fell flat, and I like that. A lot of the time, I find that horror films either lean toward too serious, or too silly; this one was just right.
One thing that I found really interesting was the use of astral projection as a plot device. I haven't seen that used much before. Generally what I've seen is that the human character is in their body while the ghost/demon/etc attempts to posses them. Here, the battle isn't happening in the mind; it's happening literally Somewhere Else.
The "somewhere else", or The Further as it's called in the film, reminded me a little of the Dungeon Dimensions in Discworld. But that's just an unrelated thought.
Anyway - the "beyond" concept has the potential to be handled in a really cheesy way, but I think that it was done very well here. The parts leading up to the descent into The Further were more scary than what happened inside of it, but it was still done in a way that was coherent and worked for what the movie was going for.
There are a few places where the film fails for me, though. Many of the incidents in The Further could have been prevented. The father (who goes there via astral projection to rescue his son) should have listened to the warnings that the Medium gave him, rather than ignoring them. Stuff where characters need to do stupid shit in order to move the plot always annoy me.
Secondly, we see too much of the monster. I find that with this kind of thing, it's more ideal to severely limit the amount that the supernatural creature is seen; otherwise, it's less effective at creating the sense of terror.
Overall, though, I think it was a pretty good movie. There were some moments that I felt were genuinely scary. Not in the "gave me nightmares" sense, but in the "holy shit" sense, if that makes any... sense.
This entry was originally posted at http://yuuago.dreamwidth.org/3380621.html. You can comment here or at the original entry.