Insidious is a 2010 supernatural horror film directed by James Wan and written by Leigh Whannell, the pair who previously created Saw. It stars Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne as Josh and Renai Lambert, whose young son Dalton, played by Ty Simpkins, falls into an inexplicable coma, along with Barbara Hershey and Lin Shaye as the parapsychologist Elise Rainier. Made on a budget of roughly one and a half million dollars and shot in around three weeks, it went on to gross close to a hundred million worldwide, which remains one of the more absurd returns in modern horror. Having finally watched it, I understand why it landed the way it did, even if my reaction is more complicated than a straight recommendation.

Let me begin with a personal disclosure that colours everything below. Anything involving spooky children is already a significant obstacle for me. Put a small child in a horror film and I am uncomfortable before the film has done anything at all. Insidious is built almost entirely on that foundation, with Dalton's empty body lying at the centre of the story and a gallery of ghostly children wandering the edges of the frame, so I was on the back foot from the opening act.

The camera work is the other thing that unsettled me, and I want to try to articulate why. In certain stretches, the film has an almost home-movie quality, a slightly raw, handmade texture that makes the whole thing feel uncomfortably close and immediate. I genuinely do not know how much of that was deliberate, but there is a compelling explanation available. Wan made a conscious decision to avoid CGI-heavy effects, building his scares instead from practical work, shadow, and lighting tricks, and the editing repeatedly holds a static frame a beat past where a more conventional cut would move on. The effect is that your own eye starts scanning the background for something, which is precisely the trap the film is setting. On a budget this small and a schedule this tight, the resulting rawness works entirely in its favour.

So here is my central verdict. Was Insidious scary? I am not convinced it was. Did it creep me out sufficiently that I stopped trusting the shadows in my own bedroom afterwards? It absolutely did. I appreciate those sound like two versions of the same reaction, but to me they are meaningfully different things. Scary is an event, a jolt, a moment that passes. Creepy is a residue. Creepy follows you home and takes up occupancy, and this film is extremely good at that specific effect, particularly in its first two acts. The back half, once the story properly enters The Further, trades a good deal of that dread for spectacle, and I found it less effective as a result. The astral projection material is imaginative but it dissipates the atmosphere the earlier scenes worked so patiently to build.