Insidious: The Red Door isn’t the series’ scariest movie, but it’s the most complete

polygon.com:

If the Insidious film series was just a little more popular, there might be a bit of a ruckus online about it apparently ending with 2023’s Insidious: The Red Door. A few weeks before its premiere, trailers entreated viewers to experience the story’s “terrifying conclusion.” At the same time, Screen Gems announced plans for an “Insidious tale,” Thread, starring Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani. While The Red Door brings back original cast members Ty Simpkins, Patrick Wilson, and Rose Byrne, there’s no guarantee they’ll be involved with future Insidious stories.

And that’s regrettable, in a way, because The Red Door is the most fully realized Insidious story so far — not the best entry in the franchise, and certainly not the scariest, but the one that explores the characters’ potential most thoroughly. This installment gives Wilson his first crack at directing, which gives him room to dig deeper into his character.

Will he ever have a chance to do that again? Hard to say. If the Conjuring universe, another horror movie series originated by director James Wan, were coming to a definitive close, there would certainly be more (or clearer) press about it. But while the Insidious series came first, it’s always been something of a kid brother to the blockbuster Conjuring movies and their spinoffs, like Annabelle and The Nun. That’s part of its stealthy charm.

In a lot of ways, Wan’s first Insidious does play like a dry run for The Conjuring. Both feature a family bedeviled by ghostly figures in their home, though Insidious is the rare horror film where the family actually moves away from the seemingly haunted house mid-movie. (Turns out, it wasn’t the house that was haunted.) Insidious has some of the slow-burn stateliness Wan