“Insidious: Out of the Further,” in theaters Friday via Sony Pictures Entertainment, is a soft reboot of the popular horror franchise. Writer-director Jacob Chase is uniquely qualified to distill what really scares audiences.
In this chapter, the sixth movie in the franchise, a woman named Gemma (Amelia Eve) is able to astral project like others in the series, but she can bring back demons from The Further to the real world, creating some new avenues for scary situations — all while processing trauma passed down from her mother (Laura Gordon) and protecting her own daughter (Island Austin).
It’s a different angle than previous “Insidious” films, and Chase says that was by design.
“Obviously I am a big ‘Insidious’ fan,” he says. “There’s also been five movies, and that’s a lot, and it’s too many. Anyone in the audience is going to ask, ‘Why are we still making these movies? This is too many “Insidious” movies, right?’ So my big pitch coming into it was, ‘This cannot feel like just another “Insidious” movie. This has to feel like it’s a fresh start.’ It’s an original film that happens to have ‘Insidious’ in the title was my goal.”
What makes Chase, whose last horror feature was the 2020 chiller “Come Play,” a unique horror storyteller? After starting his Hollywood career early as an actor and indie director, he found another purpose, one that blended his love of scares with a philanthropic component. He built Bigworm Sherwood Scare, a charitable haunted attraction, by hand in Northridge, Calif. For two years, he operated the 1,800-foot maze, with all of the proceeds going to cystic fibrosis research and aid. The attraction ran from 2012-2014.
Developing in-person scares taught Chase about the mechanics of fear that would serve him while directing.
“It became this overwhelming, larger-than-life attraction where no expense was spared,” he says. “It was like creating a full-on Disney immersive experience kind of thing. It was so much fun, and we all loved it, and it became a big hit, and so we kept doing it. It’s really where I learned how to scare people. We would do these rehearsals before we opened to the general public where I would be watching on cameras, or I’d follow them and see where moments landed, where they got scared, where they felt suspense that I wasn’t expecting. That dark corner that, for us, was just a corner you turn, we saw, ‘Oh, they’re scared to turn down that corner. How can we use that to our advantage?’ What I found was that film is surprisingly similar to the live attraction experience, in that you are taking the audience by the hand and you’re guiding them. In real life, you’re guiding them through a series of hallways, but in a movie, you’re guiding them with the camera. It’s about creating that misdirection and those false expectations, and hopefully surprising them in ways that they didn’t expect.”
One element his past as a scary maze operator was especially helpful for is the jump scares the series is known for. Chase says that he’s no fan of them when they’re used to just jolt the audience with no payoff. But he believes the film deploys them effectively and for a purpose.
“What I tried to do was to make sure every single time there was a scare moment in the movie, that it had real stakes, that it really, it fundamentally changed the story in some way,” he says. “The very first jump scare of the film is the first moment of Gemma discovering she has some sort of new unique ability. That was a perfect example of it fundamentally changing her in some way. Working with Amelia, who stars in the film, we were working through the whole character arc. We found that as we were breaking down where her touchstone moments of becoming more and more unraveled, they were all tied to these jump scare moments. I think that’s no accident, because I worked in the script so hard to make sure every one of these moments had emotional impact. Hopefully we were successful.”
Beyond the frights, Chase knew he needed to have a strong emotional backbone to the story. He was able to strengthen it by infusing some of the anxiety he had about becoming a parent himself.
“I definitely come at it from a character perspective first,” Chase says of writing the script. “The thing that I really wanted the audience to experience was this character desperately trying to outrun her own mom. I was becoming a dad for the first time while I was writing this, so it definitely inspired and fed into my fears and my own anxieties of, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be a dad. I’m not ready, and I don’t want to be like my parents, and what do I do?’ That real human anxiety is really where my writing of the character started and my writing of the movie, and then the scares branched out from there.”
Those scares are best exemplified by the film’s most inventive setpiece, where Gemma gets lost in an endless pillow fort filled with baddies around every corner. It’s a creative slice of horror filmmaking that also evokes the liminal-space terrors of one of the year’s biggest movies, “Backrooms.”
“It was funny when I saw ‘Backrooms,’ I thought, ‘Wait, please don’t go into a pillow fort, please don’t go into a pillow fort.’ Luckily they did not,” Chase says. “I find places that are repetitive and confusing quite terrifying. I was just leaning into my own fears. ‘The Descent’ is a film that always terrifies me. And there’s that sequence where they’re crawling through really tight tunnels where they can’t turn around. I was trying to capture that feeling of claustrophobia and that feeling of never-ending ‘Where am I?’ We all truly got lost in there making the movie. It was a scene that was important because it set the stage for these are the kind of scares we’re going to have in the film, as it’s fairly early in the movie. I was leaning into my own fears of claustrophobia and really Gemma as a character: what’s the worst thing that could happen to her in this moment, that specific character? And this felt right.”
Another personal fear Chase infused into the script was his dislike of dentists, which leads to several squirmy big-screen moments. But the genesis of his fear is arguably scarier than anything on screen.
“I got my wisdom teeth taken out, and they put me to sleep for it, but I guess they didn’t give me enough sedative,” Chase says. “So I woke up in the middle of it and started flailing my arms. Apparently I hit the dentist and his drill went through my lip. So I woke up with stitches all over my mouth, and it was awful.”
After “Insidious,” Chase is turning his attention to a secret project: directing an as-yet-unannounced horror film at Blumhouse for Universal. That vote of confidence from “Insidious” producer Jason Blum solidifies that Chase is part of the rising class of horror filmmakers bringing his own brand of magic to the big screen.
“Scaring people is kind of like magic — literally magic tricks — which is also something I had a real affinity for growing up,” he says. “It’s all misdirection, right? It’s figuring out how you can constantly surprise an audience in the way that the best magic tricks do.”
Watch the trailer for “Insidious: Out of the Further” below.