What has the Lambert family been up to since we last saw them in Insidious: Chapter 2?
When last we met the Lambert family, astral projectors Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Dalton (Ty Simpkins) had survived multiple trips into The Further. Dalton had been kidnapped by a demon… Josh had rescued him, only to be trapped in The Further while a ghost possesses his body in our world… that ghost, in Josh’s body, had rampaged through his house, trying to kill his family… and Dalton had ventured back into The Further to find his real father and bring him back.
“After the second film, I felt there was nothing more to be done or said or explored with the Lambert family,” says Wilson who, aside from returning as Josh Lambert, also marks his directorial debut with Insidious: The Red Door, opening across Philippine cinemas July 5. “I had saved my son, been saved myself, been possessed; I had gone through just about everything you can do in a horror movie. The biggest question that I asked, and that I wanted to pose to the audience, was what happens to a family after ten years, when you’ve been hypnotized in order to forget your family trauma?
“In hindsight, that’s probably not the healthiest way to deal with trauma: ‘It didn’t happen, you’ll forget this.’ I wanted to unpack that,” Wilson continues.
In Insidious: The Red Door, the epic conclusion to the terrifying saga of the Lambert family, the story picks up as the original cast reunites for the third chapter in the family’s saga and fifth and final film in the blockbuster horror franchise, following two prequels. Ten years after the events of the second film, Josh and Renai (Rose Byrne) have divorced, as Josh struggles to piece together a life that seems to have major holes he can’t fill. Dalton, now a young adult, is heading off to an East Coast art college, and has a strained relationship with his father.
“It’s stilted because of the events that have happened, and they don’t really know why,” says Wilson. “They have missing chapters – holes in their memory – and there’s resentment from Dalton’s side. Two men who can’t quite express their desire to make their relationship better because they don’t know where it went wrong. And yet they’re tied together in more ways than one, and Insidious fans know exactly what that means.”
“I love the fact that we were able to bring the original cast back together to bring the Lamberts’ saga to a close,” says producer Jason Blum. “Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne, of course, but also Ty Simpkins, Lin Shaye, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson and Andrew Astor. Getting to see how the cast has aged – especially the actors who were children and have grown into young men – underscores the heart of the story for me: that this is a family finding their way as they move through their lives.”
Reuniting the cast became a central pivot point of Wilson’s direction of the film – his reason for wanting to do it, and later, a driving force in his vision for the film.
Says Wilson, “I wanted the movie to feel like it closes out the Lambert trilogy – if you’ve seen the first two movies, you get a feeling for them – but I’ve shown it to people who know nothing of the Insidious franchise, and I know, you don’t need to see those movies to understand.”
