Insidious: The Red Door – the fifth film in this long-running horror series – provided star Patrick Wilson with a new landmark: it’s his first film in the director’s chair. In many ways, this is an ideal situation for Wilson in particular.
He starred in the first two Insidious films, both put together by director James Wan, who also worked with Wilson on the first two Conjuring films as well as the two Aquaman films. Having one of the best working filmmakers on the speed dial probably comes in handy when you’re taking your first big-screen directing gig.
But more than that, we’re talking about a series Wilson feels at home in, with a cast and crew he’s known forever who wanted to help him realize his vision. And it’s a franchise with a consistent following. It’s a good job if you can get it, and you can feel Wilson’s comfort level watching the movie.
But the first director was not only happy to be there. He wanted to make a new movie Insidious that directly deals with the traumatic events of those first two movies, and especially the second, in which Josh Lambert (Wilson’s character) is possessed by the ghost of a serial killer and attempts to murder his family. . Insidious Chapter 2 ended with Josh and his son, Dalton, hypnotized and forced to forget about all their haunted adventures with all those creepy ghosts. But that’s not the end of the story – as in the real world, repressed trauma often comes back to bite us in the ass.
“I really wanted to unpack the second movie and deal with the trauma. It’s the only way I knew how to make a movie that I was passionate about, that I felt like I had the power to do,” Wilson told GameSpot. “So luckily I’m surrounded by people who are long-time collaborators who knew they would trust me and be there for questions and help and who, of course, I was using.
“Because I think it’s important. It’s very collaborative – it’s a team sport. So yeah, it was a real gift, really, to have my first one out of the gate to be such a successful franchise, such an integrated audience, but the creative ability to push the envelope a bit and make a different kind of film, but still respecting the legacy, so that’s what I wanted to dig into.
Given the haunted nature of the Insidious films, we had to ask him if he had ever experienced anything that he might have perceived as supernatural or extra scary during one of these films or the Conjuring films. But Wilson said no.
“First all of these movies, definitely the first two, we did on such a shoestring budget it was like, and you’re so pressed for time that there’s not a lot of time to think about something else like something scary happening,” Wilson said. “And certainly on this movie, you know, I’m trying to scare the audience. I’m not trying to scare myself. So I’m trying to create something that I think would be cool or that would be scary or different. Nothing really happens to me, no.
Given his rich history with the Insidious franchise, we decided to have some fun with Wilson playing Mate, Marry, Murder – GameSpot’s family-friendly, alliterative version of that gross game you’ve all heard of – with three Insidious villains. : the lipstick-faced demon, the bride in black and the man who can’t breathe from the previous third film, which Wilson was not in.
“I’m probably mating the lipstick demon because he’s a cool guy, Joe Bishara. He’s a good friend of mine. So I think it’s good to have a certain amount darkness in your life,” Wilson joked. Bishara, by the way, isn’t just the guy with the horrifying demon makeup – he’s a well-known composer who composed the film’s score.
“Marry, I’m not going to go with the bride because I think I’m going to murder the bride,” Wilson continued, speaking of the show’s main antagonist. “I guess I would marry the whistling person just because I’ve never worked with them, so maybe it would be like an arranged marriage to a spooky whistling ghost, whoever it is.”
In response, I joked that the hissing demon “can’t be worse than the other two, can it?” But Wilson disagreed.
“Oh, I mean it could be, of course. But that’s the bet you take when you get married, my friend.”
Insidious: The Red Door hits theaters July 7.
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