Insidious: Out Of The Further throws a surprisingly fun ghoul party

Gemma has familial experience with these demonic matters without fully realizing it; her haunted childhood with a seemingly zonked-out mother is detailed in a grabby opening sequence full of tactile details, like a flashlight plastered with grade-school homework stickers. When the movie jumps forward to 2019, just weeks after the events of the previous film, Gemma is still living in her mom’s old house, where she’s raising her daughter Maya (Island Austin) alone and trying to give her a happy, stable life. For Gemma, that involves covering for her recent bouts of Further-traveling, which she initially brushes off as particularly vivid nightmares. So yes, Gemma both dwells in her long-held trauma, refusing to let go of any Mom Stuff she literally keeps packed and stacked in her garage, and attempts to shut Maya out from it, never talking about what happened in that killer opening sequence. The movie’s psychological material is just as riveting as it sounds, which is to say less riveting than the two or three dozen times similar stories have been employed in other small-scale horror pictures. Is the material so forgettable that filmmakers have forgotten how overused it is?

Where writer-director Jacob Chase excels, however, is crafting a variety of horror set pieces in a series of confined locations, ranging from the dental office where Gemma works as a hygienist (complete with a Little Shop Of Horrors-style within-the-mouth POV shot) to a simple Further extension of a pillow-and-blanket fort, sort of a Backrooms Junior or maybe a streamlined Skinamarink. Nothing in Out Of The Further ventures that far into experimentation, of course, but Chase has a lot of precision-based fun rotating his camera just enough for menacing figures to dart in and out of frame at key moments, or squeezing it into tight spots to limit its perspective. Though the movie has some cheap noise-based jumps, it also sometimes opts to give its various creepy faces quiet little peek-outs, rather than putting the audience on blast whenever possible.

That restraint doesn’t keep Chase from pulling out all the stops for a lively, reality-hopping, ghoul-packed finale, and it shouldn’t be a spoiler to note that Elise (Lin Shaye), now the only human character to appear in every Insidious installment, turns up to do her wise-guardian-angel routine. Though she’s not in this one very much, the tone more closely recalls the sillier Elise-centric third and fourth films, rather than the more dour second and forth, which followed up on the family from the original. Insidious can accommodate either of those styles, but it best stands out when it allows a variety of relatively early-career horror directors (original writer Leigh Whannell, future Escape Room director Adam Robitel, and now Chase) to go wild with its spookhouse aesthetics, footnote-heavy continuity, still half-incomprehensible lore, and recurring cast of… demons? Ghosts? It still isn’t entirely clear. What’s more obvious is this: As its six-and-counting movies come closer to passing long-dormant horror franchises like Nightmare On Elm Street (which feels like a clear influence), the Insidious series has found, in its modest put-on-a-scary-show spirit, a key to unlikely longevity.

Director: Jacob Chase
Writer: Jacob Chase
Starring: Amelia Eve, Island Austin, Sam Spruell, Lin Shaye, Maisie Richarson-Sellers, Brandon Perea
Release Date: August 21, 2026