‘The films are about relationships, not scares’ - Patrick Wilson on Insidious: Red Door

Star and director Patrick Wilson, and co-star Ty Simpkins chat to Jessica Rawnsley about what is in store for viewers in the latest and last Insidious film

“It’s not the house that’s haunted. It’s yourself.” The latest, and last, instalment of the Insidious franchise of haunted-house movies is as spine-chilling, jaw-shaking and blindly terrifying as its previous iterations.

Over five films, with two prequels, various generations of one family have been haunted, possessed, murdered, chased and mercilessly spooked.

The creation of Leigh Whannell, who burst onto the horror scene as a writer and actor in Saw, and director and screenwriter Scott Teems, the final chapter sees the family confronting their dark past and attempting to banish their demons once and for all.

Patrick Wilson is back as Josh Lambert in Insidious: Red Door - and this time he's also behind the camera (Picture: Nicole Rivelli/©2023 CTMG, Inc

Insidious kicked off back in 2010, centred on a seemingly normal family dealing with an anything-but-normal problem. Malignant spirits are trying their best to murder a couple by way of their comatose child who explores the attic of their new home, encounters a mysterious entity and unwittingly becomes a vessel for all kinds of ghastly ghouls and diabolical demons.

The final chapter of the Lambert family’s blood-curdling saga, Insidious: Red Door, is set ten years later, with star Patrick Wilson making his directorial debut. Wilson says that after the previous Insidious film he felt there was “nothing more to be done or said or explored with the Lambert family.

“I had saved my son, been saved myself, been possessed; I had gone through just about everything you can do in a horror movie. The biggest question that I asked and that I wanted to pose to the audience was what happens to a family after ten years, when you’ve been hypnotised in order to forget your family trauma? In hindsight, that’s probably not the healthiest way to deal with trauma: ‘It didn’t happen, you’ll forget this’. I wanted to unpack that.”

Wilson is back as father Josh, now divorced from mother Renai, played by Rose Byrne; their now college-aged son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins) is off to art college, while Andrew Astor is Foster, the younger son.

Ty Simpkins as Dalton Lambert in the new Insidious film (Picture: Nicole Rivelli/© 2023 CTMG)

This time round the family must travel deeper into The Further than ever before, facing their family’s generations-crossing haunted past and a whole new band of spooky menaces. The Further is a purgatory dimension on an astral plane, populated by the tortured spirits of the deceased, which some unfortunate members of the Lambert family have the ability to travel to through astral projection.

In the last film, Insidious: Chapter 2, Josh and Dalton had already survived multiple trips into The Further. They’ve been kidnapped by demons, possessed by ghosts, battled The Lipstick-Face Demon, The Bride in Black, The Woman in White.

Simpkins, also known for Jurassic World and appearances in the Marvel franchise, says: “It’s such a pleasure to come back and play Dalton again after so long.” The Insidious franchise was such a distinct moment in my childhood that I really look back and remember fondly, and now that I get to come back and play Dalton again as a fully fleshed-out character, it’s such an exciting thing for me. It was such a fun challenge to be able to do that.

“It was fun because for me at the time of getting the script originally, I was first going to college… So seeing interactions that I’ve had in my day-to-day life on the script, I was like oh, that’s funny, that’ll be easy to play around with.”

And how was Wilson’s first time in the director’s chair? “Most everything was unexpected because I just didn’t know it,” says the actor. “So I would surround myself with people and every day I would say, ‘listen, you guys are all really good at your jobs and you’ve all done them more than I’ve done this job so let’s have an open line of communication.”

“I approach directing like I approach acting. From the inside out. So I want positive attitudes… the best work comes out of people that have a good attitude. And I always wanted people to get home to their loved ones and get recharged for the next day. That’s much more important to me than just grinding a crew down to get your shot.”

On balancing the family trauma aspects with the stock horror elements like jump-shocks, Wilson says: “Well, the drama, that’s much easier and much more my wheelhouse. Those are the kinds of movies that resonate with me. Those are the kind of horror movies that resonate with me. You can’t get a family drama or a domestic drama made in a studio setting anymore. But if you put it through the eyes of a horror movie, you can get it.

“But even if I think of movies like Poltergeist, or even in a weird way, Silence of the Lambs, those are movies to me that are really about relationships and humanity and less about the scares.”

Trauma, he continues, was the film’s most important theme. “The second film is incredibly traumatic for that family. Where do they go from there? This is where they go from there… And it’s ugly and its messy. And then the technical proficiency comes in with when we had jump scares and when we had different kinds of scares, because I wanted a wide variety in the movie, I didn’t want just every count of three there’s a thing that pops out of somewhere. I wanted to keep the audience guessing.

“So sometimes there’s not a lot for a long amount of time and then when it comes it’s bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, and then it goes away and it comes back. It’s like music. It’s very musical to me.”

If horror is your thing, there’s still time to catch up on the first five films before the finale hits cinemas.

Insidious: Red Door will be in UK cinemas from 7 July

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