From the Lipstick-Face Demon’s claws to Lin Shaye’s return, here’s everything we noticed in the ‘Insidious: Out of the Further’ trailer and posters.
That brings us to Insidious, the film that started it all. Here, we meet Josh (Patrick Wilson), his wife Renai (Rose Byrne), and their children Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Foster (Andrew Astor), and infant daughter Kali. The busy family’s lives are changed when Dalton slips into a coma after falling from a ladder in the attic. With no signs of improvement after spending months in the hospital, Josh and Renai bring Dalton home, only to now have to deal with a sudden influx of paranormal activity. Desperate for relief, the family moves, but when that doesn’t work, Josh’s mother, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), contacts her old friend Elise, who explains to the family that Dalton is trapped in The Further—and that Josh was once trapped down there, too. Elise reminds Josh he can astral project and puts him into a hypnotic trance to enter the Further and rescue his son from the Lipstick-Face Demon. He’s possessed by the Bride in Black and strangles and kills Elise.
Insidious: Chapter 2 picks up immediately where the previous installment left off, with Renai being questioned by the police about Elise’s death. With the help of Tucker and Specs, Renai gets in contact with Elise’s former colleague Carl (Steve Coulter), who attempts to make contact with her spirit. They discover that the Bride in Black was a serial killer named Parker Crane, one of the patients at the hospital where Lorraine used to work. Dalton returns to The Further to find his father, while Tucker and Specs are called to help a young girl named Allison, who is also in a coma. Elise’s spirit wanders through Allison’s family’s home, where she meets an entity in the shadows.
The most recent entry in the franchise, Insidious: The Red Door, is actually a direct sequel to Chapter 2 despite being released a decade later. We fast-forward to 2019, where a divorced Josh and a college-aged Dalton begin to remember and make sense of what happened to them all those years ago. Dalton figures out how to seal the door to The Further with paint, but in a post-credits scene, we see the light over the door flicker.
Now that we’re finally caught up and have refreshed ourselves on some of the finer details in the franchise, it’s time to take a closer look at the trailer and the official poster for Insidious: Out of the Further. Written and directed by Jacob Chase, we leave the Lamberts behind and instead follow Gemma (Amelia Eve, The Haunting of Bly Manor), a young single mother who discovers she can travel into the Further and bring whatever lives there back with her into the real world.
While we’re all familiar with the concept of astral projection and its importance to the franchise, the trailer seems to suggest that Gemma’s connection will be unlike anything we’ve seen before. First of all, like Dalton, it seems like Gemma was only able to access The Further after hitting her head—she falls back in her chair and onto the floor while performing a dental exam on an elderly patient who just so happens to have another set of teeth in his mouth.
But is he actually someone we’re supposed to be afraid of? There are plenty of ghoulish characters throughout the franchise, but I have a suspicion that this man and his equally creepy family might not be the real threat here. If we take a closer look at the film’s official poster, we see three hands around Gemma’s head—one is Keyface’s, the other looks like the Lipstick-Face Demon’s claws, and the third might belong to our actual Big Bad.
Of course, they’re not the only entities Gemma needs to worry about. In one shot, we see a large group of them standing outside, but I’m most curious about the entity we see in the car smiling with a shotgun. I could be totally wrong, but she looks very similar to Doll Girl, the tragic, teenage entity Josh briefly meets in the first film. I’ve always been curious about her and I’m hoping we get to see more of her in this installment.
But what we really need to talk about here is Elise. Despite her death in the first film, Elise has remained the emotional and supernatural backbone of the franchise, and if the trailer is any indication, it seems like we’ll get more than just a flashback or séance sequence with her, which I’m personally thrilled to see.
The trailer ends with a slowed version of Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” before fading out to give us one final scare involving an endless pillow fort and a very freaky white-faced entity. Maybe it’s just a fun callback to the first film, where the song was used during one of the franchise’s most iconic scares, but between Elise’s return, Doll Girl’s appearance, and all of the hints suggesting we’re going to come face-to-face with the Lipstick-Face Demon again, I have a feeling that Insidious: Out of the Further might have stronger ties to the first film than we expect. We’ll find out exactly what’s waiting for us, though, when the film arrives in theaters on August 21.
