Insidious Spoiler Alert Spoiled

I have been waiting to see Insidious since it came out in the theatre. I love a good scary movie to make my skin crawl and make me jump. I’ve been nervous to see it alone, but it couldn’t be helped. My friends don’t share my creepy cravings and I have used up my date night with Big Rod going to see Hannah (which was a disappointment, btw).

So, I put on my big girl panties and headed for Belleville. There were only a handful of people in Theatre 8. The one time that I would have really liked to have some company, everyone decides to stay home and leave me alone to put my feet up. That’s Murphy’s Law of big screen entertainment, right? If people can irritate the shit out of you, they will.

The first thing I noticed about the movie was the impressive use of silence. A good scary movie maker knows the most frightening noise is dead silence and the creepiest monsters are the ones you can’t really see. My first impression was good right from the credits; Lots of black and white scenes with shadowy figures behind curtained windows, ominous grandfather clocks and long hallways. To really put me in the mood, there was some blood curdling violin music similar to something from the original Psycho. I’m certainly no expert on the genre, but I know what I like... and there was a big grin on my face as I shoved handfuls of buttery popcorn into my face.

As the plot thickened, the digital sound system worked its magic. When Dalton first encountered the monster in the attic, there was a sound like cracking eggs and clicking fingernails. Still no visual though; typical of the Paranormal Activity films. It wasn’t long into the movie when I heard nefarious whispering over the baby monitor and lots of thumps in the dark that seemed to come from beside me, behind me and even underneath me. The next thing I know, the baby is crying and, when the mother runs into the nursery, there’s a veiled figure looming over the crib. I wasn’t expecting it, of course, and it made me jump and swear out loud.

At this point I worried that my child-size Coke and the surprise spooks might contribute to me peeing in my big girl panties. I started to watch most of the scenes through my fingers.

At 7:15 p.m. I was starting to get really spooked. All the creepers had made their appearance: the early 20^th century boy in short pants, the 50s plastic family with the bright red lipstick and Raggedy Ann eyes, the black leather-wearing bouncer with disfigured face...  not to mention the Freddy Krueger/Darth Maul wannabe demon. My skin was starting to hurt from the constant chicken skin.

And, the worst was yet to come. In an attempt to save his Dalton, the father tries astral projection to travel through ghostly dimensions. They were trapped in the nothingness of endless black when I decided to leave the theatre. That’s right. I am a chicken shit. The way I saw it, none of the Saw/Paranormal Activity movies have happy endings and, at this point in the film, I could fool myself into believing the dad returns to his body and the boy comes out of his coma and everyone wins. Besides that, I was losing precious daylight hours and there was NO WAY I was driving home in the dark by myself after this movie.