30 Days of Horror | Day 1

A Scary Theatre Experience

Insidious

As the first in my October Horror series this was pretty straight-forward to come up with, as it's not very often that the horror films I see at the cinema are all that scary. I was fairly certain that Insidious would be no different, despite all of the reviews telling me otherwise. I think that horror, like comedy, is one of the hardest genres to convincingly and objectively review, simply because the success of the film lies in each viewers subjective reaction to it.

My subjective reaction to Insidious was that it scared the crap out of me.

I've already reviewed Insidious here, and talked about why it scares me here, so I'll try to keep this brief so as not to tread over too much of the same ground once again. Something about Insidious really struck a nerve in me, which was only heightened by the huge screen/loud speakers set up of the cinema. I'm a sucker for a jump scare and always have been, but the scares in this film were unlike the usual. They weren't just jump scares, they were some truly horrific images that stayed with me long after leaving the cinema. At the time I first saw the film I was in my first year of University and had only been living in halls for two months and so sleeping in a still unfamiliar room with these images fresh in my mind was not a lot of fun.

Insidious affected me a lot more than any horror film that has been produced in recent years, and I love it for that. I went to see it at the cinema again in the hopes that seeing it a second time, and being able to prepare for the scares, would make it lose its impact. That didn't work, and hasn't worked with any subsequent viewings. It think it is safe to say that Insidious is one film that will keep scaring me over and over again.