Back in April 2011, before they had scared audiences senseless with The Conjuring, lead actor Patrick Wilson and director James Wan worked together on a teeny tiny horror movie called Insidious.
Wan had previously delivered Saw (before gornography went out of style) and Dead Silence (which nobody saw, and rightly so, because it was crap), so expectations were pretty low his new scary movie.
A budget of $1.5 million (next to nothing for a Hollywood production), with Wilson starring alongside Rose Byrne - before her career shot out of the stratosphere off the back of X-Men: First Class and Bridesmaids - and Ty Simpkins - who would go on to be the mop-haired lad running from dinosaurs in Jurassic World - there was no real reason for anyone to get too excited in the lead up, but then that first trailer dropped...
That is a great trailer for a horror movie, because there is A LOT going on, but not in a particularly "Oh, I know where this is going" kind of way.
And it puts the spin on the whole speed-bump you usually get in a haunted house movie, which is us asking why the family don't just move out. You can't move out of your own family, especially when your comatose young child is the reason why the inside of your house looks like it suffered through a localised, sentient earthquake that hates plates and anything made of glass.
That tiny budgeted movie went on to make just shy of $100 million at the box office, so the sequel arrived two years later, and it went on to bank over $160 million. Chapter 3 arrived, dumping most of the cast but sticking with paranormal linked Elise (Lin Shaye), and still managed to make over $110 million.
The cheap-to-producer, easy-to-profit formula will continue on Friday 12 January, when Insidious: The Last Key arrives in cinemas, so now is as good a time as any to catch up on the Insidious mythology before it comes back to make you scream your lungs up all over again.
Clips via Universal Pictures
Film 4 is showing all three of the movies this weekend:
Insidious is on Friday at 11.15pm.
Insidious: Chapter 2 is on directly afterwards, in the wee hours of Saturday morning at 1.20am.
And finally, Insidious: Chapter 3 is on Saturday night, at 11.15pm.
