Movie Review: Insidious

“Insidious” is a haunted-house movie that has some of the most scary and indelible images I’ve seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it’s that unsettling. The movie was directed by James Wan, who’s best known for making the original “Saw,” and produced by Oren Peli, the creator of the “Paranormal Activity” films.

It’s about a couple, played by Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne, whose home is plagued by the usual clanks, growls, and playfully sinister disturbances. Then one of their young sons lapses into a coma. As it turns out, though, it’s his spirit that’s been hijacked, overtaken by ghosts who have a way of showing their creepy, smiling, old-fashioned nightmare faces at just the right moment to goose you with anxiety.

Lin Shaye plays the psychic exorcist who can see into their world, and her fluky cornball intensity helps to lift Insidious into a realm of menacing excitement.

As a director, James Wan is better known for severed limbs than subtlety, but here he reaches back to the stately spookiness of the 1962 low-budget classic “Carnival of Souls,” adding a touch of early David Lynch, to conjure a vision of hell that is terrifying in its dreamlike banality. Like most haunted-house films, “Insidious” is a contraption, but it’s one that won’t let go of you.