After two installments that served as prequels to the Patrick Wilson/Rose Bryne haunted house chillers, “Insidious: The Red Door” takes the underdog horror franchise back to the present.
It’s been 10 years (in real-time and movie time) since the events of “Insidious: Chapter Two,” and the college-aged Dalton (Ty Simpkins) must help his father (Patrick Wilson) return to the “Further” to put an end to their supernatural perils once and for all.
Wilson makes his directorial debut with the horror feature. It’s the first of the franchise since “Insidious: The Final Key” earned $67 million domestically and $167 million worldwide on a $10 million budget in 2018. Scott Teems wrote the script based on a story by franchise co-creator Leigh Whannell.
The first “Insidious,” which opened in April 2011 and earned $99.5 million on a $1.5 million budget, marked a comeback for director James Wan and writer Whannell after the commercial failures of “Dead Silence” and “Death Sentence.” The Blumhouse flick, also produced by Oren Peli, sold itself as being from the director of “Saw” and the director of “Paranormal Activity.”
While this series has somewhat remained in the shadow of Wan and Whannell’s other early 2010s supernatural haunted house horror franchise, “The Conjuring,” the first four “Insidious” films have earned $555 million on a combined $26.5 million budget.
Wan, Whannell and Oren Peli’s “little horror franchise that could” is the second-most profitable major horror franchise in terms of rate-of-return behind “Paranormal Activity.” It was the first “Insidious” that essentially set the stage for a decade’s worth of slow-build haunted house horror melodramas, just as Wan and Whannell’s “Saw” gave us years’ worth of grindhouse shock-horror offerings.
The last film broke box office records for a “first weekend in January grindhouse horror movie,” which were only this year been broken by “M3gan” and its $95 million/$176 million haul.
