A ordinary family. A new house. Things that go bump in the night. Insidious is a startling new horror film by Saw director James Wan. He and writer Leigh Whannell caught up with fans in Glasgow to talk about how it all began.
"At film school, at the University of Melbourne, we were both straight out of high school," recalls James. "It was a very artsy film school, not the sort of place where people make films like this. We bonded over our love of things like Evil Dead, while most of the other guys were there to make sorta black and white art films about rocks. And so after film school we just kept hanging out and eventually we realised we'd have to pay for a film ourselves.
"We were big fans of haunted house films, we're big fans of ghost stories. When we finished film school we were trying to come up with ideas for a movie we could make with no budget, pretty much no money at all. It was round that period we started cooking up the concept for what would eventually become Saw, but one of the other ideas was about astral projection, what would happen if when you went to sleep at night your soul leaves your body and travels to another place, another astral dimension. That was an idea we both loved, so years later when we got the chance to make a haunted house film, we thought that concept would mesh really well with it; the idea of a haunted house film where the haunting doesn't come from the house itself, like most of those movies tend to be. So we filled that concept out.
"It was filed away years ago, that idea, and it was actually the producers of Paranormal Activity who decided to help the whole project, they had just done PA in a little house in LA. The whole concept of the film was, 'We can't give you much money for a budget or much of a schedule but we can give you total creative freedom to make a film you want to make, we won't hassle you. Just make it right and get on with it', which isn't something you hear very much in LA. Plus, the very notion of a haunted house movie means you don't need a big location."
Leigh concurs. "When people ask what the inspiration for this film was, they often guess other movies. I guess aesthetically it has influences from other films, but our biggest inspiration came from those stories that we'd heard from families and friends, scary stories that we wanted to put up on screen and that will hopefully resonate in the same way as when we heard them."
James is keen to expand on this. "One of the rules of horror films - especially during the Eighties when characters were all cardboard cut-outs making stupid decisions, dumb teenagers in their underwear walking round outside going, 'Is there anyone there?' - is that when all the stuff goes down if you can't relate to the characters then you don't actually care about them, you're just getting off on them getting hacked to death. So we looked at films like The Exorcist, which was made during a different time - they spend so much time in the beginning setting up the family, the little girl's mother, you follow her to work - you just know if that film was made today they'd be like, 'Do we really need that scene where she goes to work at the movie set?', unless it paid off later somehow. But by the time it gets to the crazy stuff where she's vomiting pea soup, you really believe what's happening, so we wanted to try to achieve that as much as we could. I sorta based the mother and father on people I knew. The biggest compliment that Patrick Wilson gave to me was that when he first got the script it read like a drama that just so happened to have the supernatural in it.
"I think with the success of the Saw films, and all the imitators it spawned, people forgot that it was possible to make a suspenseful scary film without flying blood and guts, and that was what I really wanted to do with Insidious, just make a real classic old-fashioned haunted house film that had lots of scary moments. It wasn't like we had to avoid blood and guts, this sort of movie doesn't need it. I can't really think of a haunted house movie I love that 's really gory, I can think of lots of zombie movies I love like that but the haunted house is a sub-genre of horror that's really about the little boy standing at the end of the corridor, it's not about limbs falling off or whatever. It almost just didn't come up. And we knew that anyone that came in expecting Saw would be scared shitless. We like surprising people."
Approaching the film in this way, James knew that good casting was vital. "Lin Shaye [who plays paranormal expert Elise] was really the very first person I wanted to get in the film, even before Leigh finished writing, when we were thinking of what the film could possibly be. I've known Lin for a while now, and most people only know her as the chick from the Farrelly Bros films, y'know, Magda from Something About Mary. But I've known her a lot better than most and actually feel she's a very capable drama actress. I wanted her to play this role really straight, but because she comes from a comedic background I knew she'd bring what we call 'the edge' to it."
There are comic touches to the film as well. Was James worried that the two investigators who arrive with Elise would unbalance the film by triggering too many laughs?
"Even these peripheral side characters, we wanted them to come across as interesting people," he stresses. "Our very first test screening, the producers really loved the first cut we showed them but they felt the two paranormal guys were way too funny. They thought it messed the whole thing up. We wanted the producers to make a TV spin-off! They even convinced Leigh that he should be cut out of the film, or he should be toned down. I was like, 'Dude, are you kidding me? Let's just test the film first, let the public see it, and if they tell us that it changes the tone of the film way too much then I will go back and I will reduce it down.' But fortunately for Leigh's acting career, we tested it and they fucking loved it. The audiences loved him so much that the producers just had to deal with it."
"I love the way they do it in Hollywood," says Leigh. "The producers don't just come right out and say it, they can't just tell you the truth; the way one of them said it to me was, 'You know what your problem is, Leigh? You're too good in the movie.' I knew he was just bullshitting me to cut me back."
"The way Leigh and I feel, by that point the audience are so on edge already, and I almost feel like after the first big scares, people are so tense, the first thing they want to do is to crack up," says James. "If you don't give them that, they'll laugh at something else, something that you don't intend them to laugh at. At the moment Leigh and [co-star] Angus showed up, the entire audience burst out laughing, even clapping, and that was what they wanted at that precise moment, they needed the relief. I think scary movies or thrillers really benefit from levity every now and then, bringing people back down just so you can bring them back up again."
Horror fans will also find humour in the film's many references to genre favourites, and there are a few Saw in-jokes in there, too.
"We shot this film in 22 days, on a really tight schedule, and on the very last day Leigh came up to me and said, 'James, you've had that silly puppet from Saw in every one of your films, you've had it in Death Sentence, in Dead Silence - dude, you need to put it in.' And I was like, 'How am I gonna shoot it, I don't even have the doll with me?' We were shooting the very last scene!"
You'll have to watch to see how they do it.
Of the film's scary side, James says "Leigh and I are big David Lynch fans, but generally because our films are pretty straightforward, that thing that Lynch does would seem out of place. But in The Further [the spirit realm from which the haunting comes] it wouldn't! We were very much inspired by Lynch but wanted to fuse his style with our own sensibilities. We were trying to find new ways to do things that were a bit different, like taking the haunting not from the house but from this astral dimension where lost souls and possibly evil entities live, this further world that's really off-kilter. One of the things Leigh and I wanted to do was go back and revisit places from earlier in the script, so in the movie when Patrick Wilson is led to the house we've been to already, it was the idea of taking what you know about the first house but now you see it from the point of view of the ghosts, you flip it around."
"Making a film is really hard for us, and it's not really worth it for us unless we think we can come up with something people haven't seen before," says Leigh. "I don't think we would've been able to make an entire film like the first half, so straight and traditional, we needed to have something that was a bit more surreal. We can tell when we watch it with people that we really lose some of them, they say, 'You really had me until you suddenly went into this weird world.' We had to take that risk. We have this tendency to want to go and do this weird stuff, we have to have it. We want to do both."
"It's very gratifying to watch and see people jumping and screaming," says James. "One of my favourite things is when I see these tweets coming in at 3 o'clock in the morning on Twitter, and I'm like, 'Why is this trending at these really odd hours? People should be home in their beds already.' And then I see that it's people who've come home from seeing Insidious and they can't sleep, they're leaving the lights on, they've sat up all night, and it was still trending so many days after the film was released. I think that's when me and Leigh realised that people are really responding to it. Plus the way the film kept up in the second week, usually films drop by half, especially horror films, but we only dropped by, like, 27% in the second week, which is pretty unheard of for a horror film. That led us to believe that word-of-mouth was good."
"That's the good thing about social media," says Leigh. "20 or 30 years ago you couldn't really discover this stuff, I guess you just had a sense if the film was doing well, but now because of Twitter and Facebook you can literally find out what people think, people are like, 'Wow, just got out of Insidious, it was really scary!'"
"Or, 'It sucks!'" James laughs.
"Yeah, but I think it's important to read those reactions."
"Leigh and I are big film fans, we're not just horror fans. We want to be able to work and make movies in any genre. The problem is Hollywood wants to pigeonhole you. Once you're successful in one genre they think that's all you can do. That was one of the reasons why my third movie - Death Sentence - was an action-revenge movie which no-one saw. No-one really recognized me for that. But we love all kinds of movies. Actually, Leigh has just written a comedy. And a kid's movie. And a drama..."
Leigh nods. "Yeah, I've spent the last few years writing all kinds of films, I didn't feel I wanted to be putting all my energy into horror. As far as us working together, our next project we've been talking about is a sci-fi film. I think it would maybe be a wrong move for us to keep making horror films again and again and again. We definitely want to make more but not unless we think we've got something cool to say.
"We don't know about a sequel. We don't go into films thinking about sequels, which sounds weird coming from the Saw guys! James only directed the first Saw. I wrote the first three so I can be blamed for them!"
Also on offer have been remakes.
"Remakes are tough," says Leigh, "especially with films you love. I mean I love The Shining but for that reason I'd never want to remake it. Like, remaking The Exorcist would be so hard because you're just holding yourself up to such scrutiny, you're remaking a classic. So I probably wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole!"
James agrees. "If you're remaking a movie where the concept's there but they didn't have the money to do it justice first time round, then I think that's cool. I mean, so many of the great films we love are remakes, The Thing, The Fly, they're great remakes that almost work as sequels as well. It's definitely tricky, especially in the film-making climate in Hollywood where no-one wants to take chances on original films. That's one of the reasons we wanted to keep our budget down, so we could create an original film and not try to do a remake of any kind."
"We got offered every remake under the sun after Saw," says Leigh, "but we kinda said no to it because we felt there was nothing interesting we could bring to it. Like the first movie of The Thing was made so long ago, it was black and white, it had these creaky special effects. The remake was kinda warranted, there was such a clear difference between the John Carpenter and the Howard Hawks version. That I think was a smart move, but not to remake a film that was made just a few years ago, that's still fresh in people's minds."
Insidious is in cinemas now.
