mamma mia: out of the further: again

the other week, i went to see the movie insidious: out of the further with my friend alison, because i am nothing if not a completist and also because i needed to be made to feel something about a cinematic year so generally awful that i am currently counting how to make a killing among my 2026 top three. i don’t want to wrong anybody, so i will not go so far as to say that the two hour movie in which glenn powell wore a baseball cap to a series of family funerals and tried to kill ed harris with a bow and arrow was actually my film of the year, but when you consider that this was a year that also included backrooms, the devil wears prada 2 and mother mary, you do begin to think a bit. this is not, of course, to say that i don’t have nervous hopes for the autumn - i am optimistic, for instance, about the debut and also about elsinore and i’m excited about the re-release of the devils, even if this obviously doesn’t count - but even so. sometimes a person needs to undertake a factory reset at insidious: out of the further, like a buzz lightyear being returned to horny spanish mode.

it is worth noting, at this point, that it feels perfectly possible i have misremembered the subtitle of the 6th instalment of the complex, overloaded and seemingly neverending insidious series, which i am fairly certain IS out of the further but could, i imagine, just as easily be insidious: beyond the final ooze, or insidious: the gate of slurm, or insidious: the summer i turned pretty, or any one of a number of other long, portentous and vaguely gassy-sounding monikers, none of which totally gets to the heart of a cinematic universe which might as well just have titled every one of its myriad sequels insidious: more of the same.

to be clear, i love the insidious series. i think it is largely quite dreadful but it is also the gungier sisterwife of the classic james wan oogie-boogie-by-numbers conjuring series; the crucial difference here being that the conjuring is a series about what if there was a haunted house and also jesus was real, whereas insidious is a series about what if there was a haunted house, and also i’m gonna pull your teeth out. that patrick wilson friend of the blog features heavily in both series is, of course, not irrelevant to my overall opinion, although in the conjuring series he is arguably more interesting, playing as he does the horniest catholic who ever lived, whereas in insidious he is less horny, and also infinitely less catholic, which is always a shame.

i will not bother explaining the plot of the insidious movies to you, mostly because the series is by now so overburdened with the weight of its own lore than it might as well be suffocating, but conversely also because every single movie in the insidious sequence could roughly be summarised the same, re: what if a guy looked round a corner at you real weird. in brief, then, insidious is a series of movies about demons. and also about having a family. and also about if what if that family came into direct contact with those demons. it is also about astral projection, although don’t ask me to get into that. interestingly, insidious actually has something of the dna of the infinitely superior sinister at its core, in as much as that they are both movies that centre around a largely nihilistic demon pantheon in which the balancing concept of god figures nary at all and likewise both movies in which the demonic character design sits somewhere between judas priest and darth maul. most of the time, in an insidious movie, you’ll find you’ll most likely be haunted for a bit by a weird looking guy, then you’ll look down a number of dark corridors where you may or may not see the outline of a weird looking guy’s shoulder, then at some point you’ll think there’s a weird looking guy, but actually it’s a hat and coat on a rack, and then, if you’re very lucky, you’ll somehow get sucked into a gloopy sort of intermediary astral plane in which weird looking guys abound, but it’ll all turn out alright in the end. if you ever worry that you have, in fact, wandered into an insidious movie, be sure to check back and consult this useful guide.

+

there is a by now fairly ancient french and saunders parody of the first mamma mia movie, which contains a very good series of jokes in which various confused phrases are thrown up on the screen in the big flowery mamma mia trailer font, the way the actual trailer kept yelling phrases like MARVELLOUS FUN and SEE MERYL! etc. my favourite of these parody phrases - and one which has unfortunately entered my daily lexicon - is the phrase IT’S A NONSENSE!, blasted onto the screen in between shots of joanna lumley singing chiquitita and people jumping in the harbour and so on. IT’S A NONSENSE has become a phrase the covers a multitude of sins for me, and it flashed through my head any number of times throughout the course of insidious: out of the further - a movie which dares to ask the question: what if we reached the natural end of an extremely long series about not very much but wanted to do the same thing again, only with additional dental torture.

tragically lite on patrick wilson but heavy on pretty much everything else, insidious: out of the further transposes the overwrought lore of the previous movies into a new host, in this case a fairly anonymous but nonetheless demon-beset mother and daughter, plus the mother’s improbably tolerant boyfriend and a tattoo artist who seems to exist mostly to carry out exposition via the medium of tattooing people’s faces on grapefruits for reasons unknown. this troupe of unhappy dingbats are being haunted, in a fairly roundabout way, by a demon who has some kind of hare-brained scheme to use the mother and daughter as conduits to bring all the other demons, including darth maul, back through from the “further”, only he can’t do that yet because of reasons, and also there are three extremely old possessed people who are also able to go to the “further” if they are asleep, plus elise from the previous movies is there - you remember elise! - and also if we go into the “further” we might be able to find the mother’s OWN possessed mother, but also we can’t do that yet so don’t worry about it, and also the tattoo artist is drawing on grapefruits again and also there’s a neighbour with a dog and blah blah blah IT’S A NONSENSE!

that, in brief, is really what the movie is about.

there is a fairly inventive scene involving being trapped inside an ever-expanding pillow fort and, of course, plenty of scares involving a guy looking at you round a corner real weird, all of which largely makes up for the fact that the movie is also derivative, and criminally dumb, and feels the need to make a play for that endlessly recurring modern horror concept, trauma, in a fashion so lacklustre as to be actively quite funny. we are treated, at one point, to what is perhaps becoming my 2020s horror movie bête noire, which is the expository cult vhs tape just randomly playing in someone’s living room, although this is directly followed up by the mother’s boyfriend digging the three extremely old possessed people out of the floorboards and smacking them each in the face, so it’s hard to tell how good or bad that specific scene really is. if this all sounds like i am mostly bashing this movie, i suppose i am, but ultimately i think my takeaway was mostly enjoyment. after all, the movie did what it thought it was doing, and it did fairy efficiently, plus we got about four seconds of patrick wilson flashback footage, and what more could a person honestly ask.