Entertainment
‘Insidious: Out of the Further’ Takes the Franchise on an Unexpected Journey
Since debuting in 2011, the Insidious series has been one of the most consistently successful horror franchises around. The quality of the individual Insidious titles is certainly a source of debate, but the pull it has with audiences can’t be denied: No Insidious movie has failed to clear $100 million at the box office, while the production budget of all five films combined doesn’t even reach $50 million. These things are as close to a guarantee as you can get with theatrical efforts today, so it wasn’t a big surprise when Sony and Blumhouse announced a sixth installment — despite the lackluster critical reception to 2023’s Insidious: The Red Door. What do you even do with a franchise that remains a box office force but seems to have run out of creative juice long ago? The answer, much to the delight of series co-creator and producer James Wan, is to take a left turn and let things get weird.
Insidious: Out of the Further is as wild and wacky an installment as we’ve seen from this franchise, clearly aspiring to fall more in line with the bonkers oddities of Wan’s filmography than The Conjuring or the original Insidious. Writer-director Jacob Chase may stick to the lore of Wan and Leigh Whannell’s Insidious franchise, but it’s obvious he takes a lot of inspiration from the likes of Malignant and Dead Silence. Bringing some of that over-the-top energy to Out of the Further, Chase is able to inject a surprising amount of energy into the series, sacrificing some of its more horrific elements in order to add in empowering characters, some shockingly genuine laughs, and a few bold choices you can’t help but respect.
‘Insidious: Out of the Further’ Focuses on a New Family
Insidious: Out of the Further is more in line with Insidious: Chapter 3 and Insidious: The Last Key, in that it doesn’t follow the story of the Lambert family. Instead of being a prequel, however, this movie takes place after the events of the others. The Haunting of Bly Manor breakout Amelia Eve stars as Gemma, a hard-working single mom who witnessed the tragic and horrific death of her mother when she was young. Gemma now works as a dental hygienist and lives with her daughter in the same house where she grew up — and where her mother died. The past she has tried desperately to forget begins to catch up to her, as a trio of eerie folks show up in the neighborhood. Their arrival is followed by several sleepless nights that Gemma spends in the terrifying realm between our world and the next, also known as the Further.
Down in the Further, there’s a chilling demon who’s essentially hunting Gemma, as he has realized she is able to take things back and forth with her between that realm and ours. With the help of his real-world acolytes, he plans to latch onto her in the Further and hitch a ride back to our world, bringing a horde of deadly demons along with him. With the help of her boyfriend (Brandon Perea), a tattoo artist with supernatural talents (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), and the Further-dwelling Insidious icon Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), Gemma has to find a way to survive her encounter with the entity and protect the life she has built for her daughter. Of course, that’s easier said than done.
Like most Insidious movies, Out of the Further kicks off with plenty of typical frights. There are some big jump-scares in the first half-hour or so; they’re telegraphed and not particularly inventive, but they are effective. The best scares in the film’s first act are much more subtle. There’s a finesse to the way Chase stages eerie moments in the background of a shot that delivers a chill down the spine, like a shadow moving far down the hallway that you can only catch if you’re looking in the right place, or somebody watching from a doorway as Gemma walks around the other side of the room. These subtle scares make a major impact early in the film, and they stick with you much longer than the big jumps.
And then there’s the dentistry of it all. We can’t talk about the scares and horror elements of Insidious: Out of the Further without mentioning a couple of sequences that are thoroughly disgusting. Two scenes at the dentist’s office are enough to make you want to call and reschedule your next cleaning. They are gnarly, plain and simple, taking an almost Evil Dead-like delight in grotesque body horror.
‘Insidious: Out of the Further’ Thrives When It Abandons the Horror
The first act of Insidious: Out of the Further is very much a horror movie. After that, though, the film leans more into a supernatural thriller/revenge fantasy mode than anything else. It stops being scary right around the moment Elise shows up and begins explaining the nature of the Further to Gemma. All the lore and rules about this extra-dimensional space are incredibly convoluted if you think about them for more than a second at a time, and Chase’s script is wise to just skim over a lot of it. It’s better to keep moving with an “it is what it is” kind of shrug than to spend several minutes digging into the why and how of everything. Keeping this thing short and breezy becomes one of the film’s biggest assets.
When Elise and the Further first show up, it feels like the film’s momentum is going to be completely derailed. The scares stop and a lot of the images that are supposed to be frightening begin to come off as laughable or redundant. At that point, it’s easy to start wondering if the movie is going to fall into the long line of horror sequel messes that lose their bite and fail to stick with you. There is a good 10-15 minute stretch in the second act that will have you wondering if everything is about to crumble in front of your eyes. But then Chase and the team totally upend expectations by leaning into the adventurous and empowering story at the film’s core, even when that means moving away from the horrors that kicked the movie off in the first place.
At its heart, this is a story about three generations of women trying desperately to protect a future that suddenly feels under attack. There is a desperation with Gemma in particular that will resonate with many a millennial parent. As the walls are closing in, she gets caught between not wanting to be what her mother was to her and simultaneously doing whatever is necessary to protect the young child she loves so dearly. She’s stuck in an impossible place, and Amelia Eve conveys that so incredibly well. She’s an emotional roller coaster all on her own, and even the most unsteady parts of the script are kept afloat by her daring performance. If you’ve been on the Eve bandwagon since The Haunting of Bly Manor, you’re in for a real treat.
Once the focus shifts to Gemma’s fight back against the demons, the tone of the entire movie transforms into something else entirely. It’s hard to explain, because neither adventure nor thriller really describe it accurately, but there’s certainly an adventurous spirit at its center. Characters come together and formulate a heist-like plan to trap the demon in the Further. There are several moving parts to the admittedly complicated endeavor, but it does allow the fun to take center stage, and it’s hard not to cheer about the turns the story takes from there. All of it culminates in an absolutely absurd final swing that I’m still smiling about hours later. It’s ridiculous, to be fair, but it’s the mad and wonderful kind of ridiculous that we’ve loved about Wan projects for so long.
Rather than settle for a middling Insidious sequel, Chase takes the opportunity with Out of the Further to swing for the fences, turning the franchise into a story of redemption, grace, and forgiveness that already feels more rewatchable than most of the franchise’s previous entries.
Insidious: Out of the Further
- Release Date
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August 21, 2026
- Runtime
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106 minutes
- Director
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Jacob Chase
- Writers
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Jacob Chase, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
- Takes the franchise in a new and unexpected direction
- An excellent performance by star Amelia Eve elevates the material
- Its over-the-top moments give the series new energy
- A weak stretch in the middle is neither scary nor entertaining
- Some scares are ineffective
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