Insidious star Patrick Wilson: Scream king takes the director’s chair in new horror sequel

NEW YORK – When Patrick Wilson was first approached about reprising the role of Josh Lambert, the patriarch of a family terrorised by ghouls in Australian-Chinese director James Wan’s haunted-house chiller Insidious (2010), he was unenthusiastic.

“Another sequel? I thought, ‘Oh boy, what new ground is there to even cover?’ I’m good. I’ve got my other horror franchise,” said the 50-year-old American actor.

The other franchise refers to The Conjuring, also conceived by Wan, which began as a 2013 paranormal horror tale that led to a separate universe of sequels and prequels in which Wilson plays one-half of a team of married demonologists.

Between The Conjuring and the first two Insidious movies, Wilson has established himself as a bona fide scream king.

Still, he is a classically trained actor who has starred in big-budget superhero movies (Watchmen, 2009; Aquaman, 2018), indie dramas (Little Children, 2006) and musical theatre productions (Oklahoma!, 2002).

The prospect of a new Insidious did not seem all that exciting.

Then, Wilson was asked if he would consider directing it too. That got his attention.

“I’d been trying to direct a movie since 2015,” he said over coffee at a New York bistro. “TV didn’t appeal to me, and I’m not the kind of guy who wants to make a tiny indie that nobody sees just to prove that I can do it. I want my movie to play well in theatres, so to have this half-a-billion-dollar franchise supported by a studio come my way – that’s rare for a first-time director.”

Opening in Singapore cinemas on Wednesday, Insidious: The Red Door – the fifth movie in the franchise – wisely skips over the lacklustre third and fourth instalments and returns to the events of Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013).

After nearly axe-murdering his entire family, Josh retakes control of his body from a psycho-biddy demon, and – with the help of a mind-scrubbing hypnotist – represses all memory of his possession.

The Lamberts are free and the credits roll.

“No offence, but that’s not how you deal with a problem,” Wilson said with a chuckle.

The Red Door – which, according to a report by industry watcher Exhibitor Relations on Sunday, topped North American box office on a slow weekend and took in an estimated US$32.7 million (S$44.1 million) – confronts the trauma of that earlier film from the perspective of a father-son relationship.

Ten years later, Josh has separated from his wife Renai (Rose Byrne) and is the quintessential absent dad, haunted by a past he cannot articulate.

In Insidious, it is revealed that the couple’s eldest child Dalton (Ty Simpkins) has inherited his father’s ability to astral project, which renders him vulnerable to the ghosts hanging out in a netherworld called the Further.

Dalton, too, had his memory erased. Now, the prickly teenager rejects his father, although he is stuck with him on the drive to his first year of art school.

Wilson – who since 2005 has been married to Polish-American actress Dagmara Dominczyk (Succession, 2018 to 2023) – accepted the offer to direct The Red Door under the condition that it would “make sense with my life”.

In practical terms, this meant shooting near his home in Montclair, New Jersey. But he was also keen for his debut to reflect him as a person.

The film marks a return to form for the Insidious franchise, recapturing the original’s pretentiousless thrills and fun-house charms, approaching the Lamberts’ grim history with the silliness and sincerity of throwback horror from the 1980s or 1990s.

Wilson, who has two sons aged 17 and 14, is not an especially big fan of the genre when he first signed on to Insidious. He considers himself a generalist.

“I grew up with Indiana Jones and Star Wars,” said Wilson, adding that his taste in film was shaped by outings to the multiplexes around Tampa Bay, Florida, where he was raised with his two older brothers.

“I was into horror movies that transcended genre – Salem’s Lot, Jaws.”

His eyes widened, and he added: “Poltergeist. I remember when I was a kid, our house was robbed. Absolutely no connection to the Poltergeist, but the way my brain processed that event, the terror I felt when we got home and realised our house had been invaded, my memory embedded the two things together.” NYTIMES