Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) and the rareness of tangible horror

The official opener of this year’s edition of Ramaskrik, the prime Norwegian horror film festival, was James Wan’s sequel to his 2010 hit screamer, Insidious. I have not actually seen the first movie, but I did not at any point feel that my lack of knowledge of the first film left me in the dark. I definitely want to see Insidious at some point too, to see if it makes me think of its sequel any differently. Anyway – please just have in mind when you’re reading this that I haven’t seen the first one, and also please don’t spoil it for me in any comments.

Ok. So. Insidious: Chapter 2 is a take on the classic haunted house story we all know and love. This is one of the first types of scary stories we become acquainted with as children, as we lie awake wondering what’s hiding in the closet, or trying to scare our friends into a similar predicament. So there’s no surprise that there are so many horror movie riffs on this theme, one of the most well known being the classic The Amityville Horror (1979, remade in 2005). One of the strengths of this sub-genre is the mere fact that it’s such a well-known theme, and one that everyone can relate to. Being afraid of those eerie sounds your house makes when you’re home alone on a dark night, not to mention the shadows creeping across the hallway, is something that everyone who has ever lived in a house can relate to. First, there were monsters in the woods; now, there are monsters in our houses.

In order for a haunted house-horror to actually work as a scary movie, it needs at least these two things: 1) an awareness of how many times you can have someone suddenly appear behind a closing door or in a mirror before it gets old, and 2) a mysterious or complex enough monster/source of horror to keep the viewer interested in one single location for the duration of a feature film. I am a big advocate for the subtleties of horror, of the ever-fading art of not making everything so god damned in your face and obvious in every single horror flick. Sure, you need the jumps and goose bump moments in movies like these, but to the human mind, the unknown is the very scariest thing there is. Which is why horror films that hint at the source of horror and leaves the rest to your terrified and paranoid mind to work out in gruesome detail, are normally the ones that can properly get under your skin. Insidious 2 handles the hinting and the mystery fairly well for a while; however, this is one of those rare movies that left me scared and at the edge of my seat even once the source of horror was fully revealed and we got a good, clear look at it. That, to me, is no small feat. Most movie monsters lose a lot of their power to scare you once you get a good look at them. Creepy woman ghost in Insidious 2? Only gets scarier.

I will give away a lot of spoilers, like details of the source of horror and who and what and why, so if you don’t want to know those things, you should come back after having seen the film. Otherwise:

We meet Mrs. Lambert and her son Josh in the early 1980s. They obviously live alone in a huge, old house. On the night that we first meet them, they receive a visit from one Elise Rainier, an expert in communicating with spirits and that sort of thing. Young Josh has been having a lot of bad dreams since they moved to this gigantic, dark house (imagine!), and his mother has noticed something weird in pictures of him: there seems to be some sort of dark figure following him around, moving in closer and closer on the young boy. Elise hypnotises Josh to tap into his mind and figure out what is going on and how much he actually knows about what’s happening to him. Josh tells Elise that the dark figure is a woman, who claims to be a friend. Elise goes searching around the house and finally finds something in the closet in Josh’s room, and as she tells Mrs. Lambert: “it is not a friend”. The thing, spirit or whatever it is, is apparently a parasite that wants to be Josh. It has come into contact with him because Josh possesses some kind of special power that allows him to see the dead in his dreams; trouble is, now one of them has seen him. And it doesn’t want to play nice.

Mrs. Lambert begs Elise for help, and they decide that Elise will try to remove (or at least reduce) Josh’s creepy ability and try to make him forget what he’s been through. Really, an incredibly malicious ghost is hunting your schoolboy son and you just want to make him forget that it’s there!? Oh well, we wouldn’t have many horror movies without people making a lot of rash and stupid decisions.

Apparently, this scheme turned out surprisingly well, until one day when Josh is a grown man with a family of his own, and one of his sons has drifted into a coma where he hangs out with dead people or something, and Elise has helped Josh go into the spirit world to get his son back. From what I gather, this was the main plot of the first film? Anyway, when Josh comes back from the dark side, Elise is dead, and what his wife Renai describes as “weird things happening around the house” just keep on happening. They go back do Josh’s childhood home to stay with his mother while the police investigate Elise’s death. Meanwhile, it soon becomes clear that whatever is haunting the Lambert family is not confined to a single, physical location – as some ghosts are. Before long, the weird shit gets out of control, and Renai and Lorraine (the older Mrs. Lambert) become aware of certain changes in their beloved Josh. Lorraine suspects that it might literally be old ghosts come back to haunt them, but because of Elise’s memory erasing all those years before, it’s difficult to tell for sure.

Elise’s assistant through many years, as well as a pair of newcomers to the whole spirit communication business, take it upon themselves to figure out what is going on. They team up with Lorraine and they end up at an old, abandoned hospital where Lorraine used to work back when Josh was an innocent, but oh so troubled kid. She recalls one patient she had, Parker Crane, who had been submitted to the ICU after trying to castrate himself. Freud ahoy, people! They continue to his old home and surprise, surprise: something bad is there. Turns out the bad thing is, SPOILER SPOILER, Parker’s completely fucking psychotic mother, who could never accept the fact that she had given birth to a useless son instead of an adorable little girl to dress up and have play with dolls and all that. So she just pretends that little Parker is a girl, calls him Marilyn and threatens him to accept the role, slaps him around for no good reason and is generally just a creepy as fuck bad bitch.

Believe it or not, Parker Crane did not turn out a normal person. Instead, he ended up killing a lot of young women (because his mummy told him to), and then lined up their corpses neatly in the basement of the house. He wore a black bridal dress while committing the murders, as a kind of disguise – and obviously very in line with the inherent gender confusion theme. Years after his death, Parker came back as a parasitic spirit who wanted to take over young Josh’s body to experience a childhood he never had. When that didn’t work out, he waited in the dark, and came back for grown-up Josh after he crossed into the spirit world to find his son (stay with me, now). He wants to be alive and part of a normal family. Trouble is, mummy dearest is still very much in control of him, and tells him that if he wants to stay alive he has to kill everyone around him. He doesn’t want to, but then teeth start falling out and Josh’s health generally deteriorating; and on top of it all, Elise’s assistant and his apprentices come after him. Let the killing begin.

In this way, Insidious 2 combines two age-old horror themes: the haunted house, and the unhealthy mother/son relationship. Luckily, the filmmakers have been clever enough to not rely too heavily on too many special effects when creating their ghosts, so that they remain scary even up close. Mrs. Crane is the scariest of all, with her white skin, black eyes and not even one tiny redeeming feature. We are shown flashbacks to her so called parenting methods when raising Parker, and it becomes very clear that this woman was not only made evil after her death.

Gender confusion is, as mentioned, a classic horror theme. Look no further than to Mr. Ed Gein, inspiration for a huge variety of classic horror movies including Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs and many more. Little boys with dominant mothers apparently have little other choice than to turn out mentally disturbed serial killers – especially when they stay with their mothers as grown-ups, in the mothers’ twisted, isolated fantasy worlds. This is not so much Oedipal as it is an expression of fear of generally dominant women, which is a recurring motif in a broad range of popular culture. And in many ways, this represents what I base my objections upon when it comes to female (and some male) horror film critics and theorists who call out for more female horror villains. We already have the Final Girl, which is way more awesome, so do we really need to portray more women as monsters in the name of equality on screen?

However, subversive gender roles is mostly a good thing if done well, and often calls for a more interesting movie experience. And even though Insidious 2 isn’t really huge on conscious gender politics and symbolism, other than using gender confusion as an explanation for the source of horror (let’s leave that one for someone else to handle), its evil characters are really well done. They manage to be pretty in your face without being over the top – and that is a difficult balance in horror films. It’s pretty rare these days that I get genuinely creeped out by a scary movie, but throughout this one I was jumping in my seat, getting goose bumps up and down my arms and legs, and felt my heart race more than once.

If you’re looking for something new to watch this Halloween, in other words: look no further. Prepare to get scared.

Wither (2012)

I don't know why, but Sweden appear to have been less keen on straight out horror films than us Norwegians for some time. Wither, a classic hiking trip gone bad tale, might well change some of that.

Wither follows a pretty traditional formula; seven young, good looking friends who are ready to party non-stop for a couple of days, seek out an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. But the gang aren't the only ones partying, there's also some zombie-esque creatures in the basement that are about to have some fun. I say zombie-esque because, like so many other films in the zombie sub-genre, they're not traditional zombies who are a bit braindead and want to eat your brrrraaaaaaiiiins. These motherbitches won't even die from a shot to the head!

It's an entertaining film, but the story will be so well known to most of you that I'm not going to go into great detail. There is one pretty unusual twist here, though: rather than a final girl there's a final boy! That was about time, wasn't it? It looked for a while as if his girlfriend was going to step up to the part, but umm, she couldn't.

I realise that the final girls have been one of the major selling points for people like myself who are interested in both horror films and feminism or at least gender theory. But because the role of the final girl is so established by now, it's cool to see someone mixing it up a bit. It's funny too that there's an implication that it's all because he's completely pussy whipped. Classy.

Unfortunately, where Dunderland might have had one too many sub-plots to follow, in Wither it's almost the opposite. The characters are shallow and underdeveloped, the main story too well known, and any sub-plots are, well, not really there. For a movie of nearly an hour and 40 minutes it does get a bit boring after a while – not because it's not a well made zombie flick, but let's face it: there's quite a few of those by now. And when you don't have a story, even a Final Boy can't help you.

Dunderland (2012) – Witch hunt meets female Jack Torrance

Dunderland is the first Norwegian horror movie to take on the witch hunts which in this country took place mainly in the 16th and 17th centuries. I was pretty excited about this, thinking it's about time that this shit hit the big screens. This film doesn't really engage with the witch hunt stories much though, other than as a backdrop. As a deep, male voice informs us in the intro; in the year 1695, 16 year old local girl Johanne Nilsdotter was accused of witchery and thrown in the lake. Her body was never found, but the community in Dunderlandsdalen keep falling victim to strange, bizarre and tragic incidents. Eventually it gets so bad that the locals proclaim the village a cursed place, and abandons it.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and stage director Laura brings her troup of actors to Dunderlandsdalen, meaning to create a stage play about the witch hunts – making reference to one of Norway's most well known "witches", Anne Pedersdotter. Needless to say, however, things do not go according to plan and weird shit starts happening. We soon understand that the house they've settled in is exactly where most of the bad things have happened over the years. A local farmer killed his wife and daughter with an axe before hanging himself in the barn; it was later used as a scout's camping place before one young girl went missing and the place is abandoned once again.

Creepy remote location? Check.

Obviously the theatre folks want to produce their play in the very same barn where the axe farmer went berserk, and before long, director Laura becomes even more eccentric than you would expect of someone in the theatre business. Then the crew start disappearing, and the mood amongst the remaining actors is less than good.

Meanwhile, the snobbiest of the crew (Paul) refuses to sleep in a cabin in the woods and leaves every evening on a snow scooter to go into town and a proper hotel. He wakes up in the middle of the night and finds a nazi party from WW2 in the living room. This all happens after he's talked to the creepy bartender who, as far as we know, is not a ghost. Paul also pays a visit to the town library where he finds heaps of articles about people who have gone missing in Dunderlandsdalen, bizarre accidents, and weirder than anything; an article in an older paper about the director Laura and her five actors gone missing.

All very creepy and thrilling, sure, but what does it mean, where does it take us? Where does the story go from here?

Turns out, Paul's entire business in the village is little more than a sidetrack for the story. He heads back to find the others and well, he won't get to make another trip into town for some time.

Creepy hotel bartender? Check.

Herein lies my issue with Dunderland; it can't quite decide on which of the many possible plots and twists and turns it presents, that it wants to stick with. There are enough ideas here for at least two or three seperate films, but when they're all thrown together in one 78 minutes long movie, it's simply too much. Or too little about whatever should have been the main story.

That said, I still like the film. The character Laura (Miriam Prestøy Lie) in particular. It's a welcome change to see that someone who isn't a middle aged man can play the weird eccentric lone wolf type person, and Prestøy Lie balances her character perfectly between misunderstood creative genius and a female Jack Torrance. The changes that her character go through in those 78 minutes is very impressive – and my initial fears that she might be a bit of a boring characters are put duly to rest.

And although the film doesn't use the material of the witch hunts as much as it could, at least it does bring it to the big screen. In my view, this has proven again and again to be one of the (many!) strengths of genre film; bring unpopular or controversial stories and motifs to the big screen, so it gets just enough attention for others to want to follow.

A "witch" meets her fate

I do hope, however, that the next time we see Norwegian "witches" (can't use that word without quote marks in this setting, really) in a movie, they will make her less witchy looking. The girl we are presented with in the opening sequence looks like she's lived her whole life in the woods, dirty and in tattered clothes and with hair that's never had a date with a bar of soap or a hairbrush. This is not what most women accused of being witches looked like. On the contrary, they were quite normal women who might have got in a quarrel with the neigbours or become the focus of someone's disliking in some other, normally quite innocent, way. Or, like Anne Pedersdotter as mentioned above; she became a widow not too long after she was first accused of witchery. By both inheriting her husband's wealth, living in isolation and growing more and more aggressive towards her fellow townspeople who, in her defence, were all convinced she was banging Satan or something of the sort. This combination of characteristic qualities didn't do much for her case however, and in 1590, fifteen years after she was first accused, she went on trial and ended up being burned alive at the stake.

It's not that there might never have been anything weird about any of the women accused of witchery, in fact I'm sure most of them were a right bunch of weirdos, much like their accusators and pretty much anyone else, ever. But playing up to that idea of these women as wild creatures, somehow more connected with nature than the rest of us, and with a truly mystical personality – it doesn't do any favours for anybody. The very essence of the cruelty and atrocity of the witch hunts lies in that they were quite normal people. Anyone could be suspected and accused, it was often simply coincidence that decided who was the witch this week.

With all of this in mind, we can only imagine how difficult, near on impossible, it must be to make a movie even just touching upon this historical material, without coming across as slightly, well, misogynist. Because even though it was innocent people getting burned alive and drowned and whatnot, it was that idea that they had some unnatural (!) connection to forces of nature or the supernatural that became their doom. In Dunderland, the lurking evil resides in nature itself, which then takes posession of normal people. How can you present that story without making it look like certain people are being attacked or posessed for a reason? A reason that might live deep inside them? It's interesting at least to think about how this might make us share the perspective of the accusators of the "witches" for a moment; that moment when we might think "ahh, of course it was she who got posessed or who did that weird thing". Because the truth is that these accusations and suspicions were mostly as random as anything, and that's the most important thing to remember about these stories.

Should you want to read more about my thoughts on women with a supernatural connection to nature and why portrayals of this aren't always necessarily misogynist, I suggest you read this: Antichrist and the nature of horror.

Overall, Dunderland scores points for effort, but lacks some depth due to wanting to tell too many stories at once. I'd still recommend it though, it's pleasant viewing and an introduction to something we haven't seen to much about on the big screen, at least in recent times. And I for one will be very excited to see what lies down the road for both writers/directors, and star Miriam Prestøy Lie.