Monday, May 2, 2011

Insidious calls forth the wrong demons

Big-screen fiends take note ? it's the unspecified, menacing terrors that spook us the most

Slashers slash you, psychotics torture you and monsters eat you. Vampires and zombies require you to share their unappetising fate. Demons, however, are something else: they can possess your very soul. Yet they pose a problem for the fright-seeking filmgoer: what are they?

During the heyday of big-screen demonic horror, from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, this wasn't much of a problem. Fiends still enjoyed a respectable pedigree in the canon of organised faiths. Not just The Exorcist, but other landmark titles such as Rosemary's Baby and The Omen drew upon timeless dogma that even unbelievers could appreciate. Thereafter, however, the great religions began to go off hell and its damnable denizens. Understandably, horror films started to rely more heavily on flesh-and-blood bogeymen.

Nonetheless, there seems to be something about the demon's allure that has survived ecclesiastical relegation. The last couple of decades have seen a revival in its cinematic fortunes. However, it's been expected to move with the times. Some of the recent wave of demonic films, like The Rite, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Last Exorcism, have tried to root their devilry once more in a Christian context, but it's not these that have taken off. The big hitters have been The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, and both of these chose to secularise their fiends.

Insidious too has little time for the first estate. A would-be clerical exorcist is quickly shown the door in favour of geeky ghostbusters armed with complicated equipment and led by a new age seer. All goes scarily enough so long as the hobgoblins are engaged only in that teasing foreplay that seems to amuse them so much. As usual, doors slam themselves, books rearrange themselves and mysterious imprints appear, all to suitably creepy effect. Yet eventually we have to be told what's generating these phenomena; as soon as we are, everything goes to the devil.

The film-makers deserve credit for creating a logically consistent universe. It's just that without roots in any genuine residual fears, the world they conjure becomes merely farcical. Nowadays, demons who depend on cadaverous complexions, grand Guignol makeup and Miss Havisham's cast-off togs for their spookiness, and whose lair features dry ice and gothic candlesticks in place of the torments of hell, just can't be expected to cut it.

In the face of today's glumly materialist attitudes, you can't help worrying that our so recently disinterred fiends may be forced to give up the ghost, and with it their comeback ambitions. One of the most enterprising of recent demonic titles was the Spanish found-footage shocker [REC]. Yet when Hollywood remade the film as Quarantine, the supernatural prime mover was stripped out in favour of a mere rogue virus.

Still, we have to acknowledge that in the first half of Insidious, the demons deliver the goods. As unexplained shadows, they conjure up a brand of dread that no other bogeyman could have managed. Fortunately for them, we seem to continue to harbour sufficient fear of unspecified, menacing malevolence; it's just when it declares its hand that it falls flat.

You can see why this might be. We're still afraid that we or those around us may become possessed by evils ? but by disease, dementia, mania, depression or rage, rather than satanic imps. In the early stages of Insidious, the diabolic atmosphere is knitted to real-life torments. Renai and Josh fear that their child has fallen prey to an incurable medical disorder. Renai fears that she's growing old and that her husband is becoming a different kind of man. He fears that she's becoming mentally ill. Such are our real terrors; nowadays, hints of the demonic can underscore them, but not surpass them.

As is customary in a film such as this, Renai experiences spooky happenings while Josh is away. When she recounts them he doubts her sanity, but when the spookiness confronts them both at once he's forced to come round. In fact, Insidious might have worked better if the spooks had stayed within Renai's mind.

Of all demonic films, some consider The Shining the most chilling. Yet while The Overlook may indeed be haunted, the demons that really matter are those summoned up by Jack's own mind. In the future, fiends should perhaps settle for a merely supporting role, as metaphors for the terrors that have outlasted them.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/may/02/insidious-calls-forth-wrong-demons

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