2011's Insidious was one of those rattly new horror funhouses that irked the purists yet loosed a lot of spare change from jumpier cinemagoers' pockets. For this inevitable sequel, co-creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell return to their Saw playbook, installing spooked parents Patrick Wilson (complete with newly suspect squarejaw) and Rose Byrne (now the best hysteric in the movies) at grandma Barbara Hershey's house before shifting backwards and sideways to establish a tricky continuum with the first film's events. Again it tends to treat its gotcha moments as throwaway wind-ups designed to spill and thus sell more popcorn, but the narrative reframing – opening up a Twin Peaks-like multiverse in which further chapters may yet unfold – is ambitious, and Wan remains a crafty enough director to draw your eye warily across the frame. You shouldn't feel so daft for flinching this time.
vie/141338/insidious" title="">Insidious trots out the same old gags with even less panache (not to mention narrative coherence) than before. With Josh (Patrick Wilson) and his tormented family now unsafely ensconced in his mother's house, it's ghost-train showtime once again, replete with ugly dolls, creaky doors, rocking horses, fusey lights and interminable interludes of quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet, bang "scares".Josh has been to the dark side and brought something back with him – presumably the scripts for Poltergeist, Amityville Horror, The Changeling, The Shining and every other well-worn genre staple that Wan and writer Leigh Whannell merely devour and then regurgitate in bite-sized chunks of second-hand horror spew. Anyone who has ever watched a horror movie will have seen all of this before, but Wan's target audience appears to be people with no interest in the genre, content merely for someone to shout "Boo!" loud enough to distract them momentarily from their mobile phones. Oh, and there's a set-up for a third instalment tacked on to the end. Boo, indeed.