Insidious: The Red Door Drew From Patrick Wilson's Real-Life Experience
"Insidious: The Red Door," the fifth film in the "Insidious" series, will mark the directorial debut of actor Patrick Wilson. Many horror fans got to know Wilson not only as the star of the first two "Insidious" movies, but also as the affable ghost-hunter Ed Warren in several features set in the "Conjuring" universe. Wilson is horror's dad. He's also a long-working, talented actor who has appeared in any number of intense indie pieces, thrillers, superhero blockbusters, and Oscar-bait dramas. He has been nominated for two Tony awards (for "The Full Monty" and for "Oklahoma!") and an Emmy (for "Angels in America"), and is never anything less than a dynamic, serviceable screen presence.
In the "Insidious" movies, Wilson plays Josh Lambert, the father of a 10-year-old named Dalton (Ty Simpkins) who possesses astral projection powers. Dalton has unwittingly attracted demons and ghosts out of an eerie purgatorial realm called The Further (italics necessary), as ghosts are drawn to living human consciousnesses that go traipsing into other realms. The family members themselves are haunted. Only by erasing their memories (as happens at the end of "Insidious: Chapter 2") can they escape the monsters.
For "The Red Door," Wilson, 49, was allowed to draw from his own personal school experiences to flesh out the movie. The new film sees Dalton, now 18, heading off to art school for the first time. His demons will reappear, as his memories of The Further will be unlocked by his art. Wilson, who has a BFA in Drama from Carnegie Mellon University, knows about art school, and wanted to insert his own college experience into his film. In a recent interview with IGN, Wilson expressed his enthusiasm.
The importance of art
It's perhaps a cliché to see children's drawings in horror movies, but Patrick Wilson tries to see the cliché with fresh eyes. For Wilson, Dalton's ability to communicate his demonic experiences is derived from the child's artistic impulses. It stands to reason, then, that Dalton should want to eventually go away to art school. Wilson sees Dalton not as a generic "son" character, but as an artist in his own right. And, with that perspective in mind, Wilson began to ask what kind of artist Dalton may be and, importantly, what kind of college experience he would have. In Wilson's recollections, art school was difficult. He compared it to a notorious 2014 drama from filmmaker Damien Chezelle. In his words:
"Anybody that goes to an arts-related program — you can even think of 'Whiplash' in the music world — [might consider] what it does to you as a person. Because it makes you look at not just technically how you play, but who are you as an artist. [...] That's something that I wanted to latch onto because artwork and even young Dalton's artwork was really the key in the first movie."
Because "The Red Door" is the fifth feature in the series, Wilson was determined to find a dramatic inter-film throughline for his characters. James Wan directed the first two "Insidious" movies, and the fifth installment links directly up to "Chapter 2," chronologically. For Wilson, it was a matter of connecting the clues that Wan had created and following them to a logical conclusion. He said:
"I wanted to take all these little breadcrumbs that James had left along the way and [ask] what does that do to a kid in college?"
Intergenerational art
Patrick Wilson then took his chosen themes of "struggling art students" and paired them with the "Insidious" franchise's established ideas of intergenerational horror. A big part of the first two movies is Josh's anxiety about passing a curse along to his son. It seems that fear would still be worthy of exploration a decade later when the curse is revealed to have lingered. Wilson, as a director, let those notions be his entry point into the material. He explained:
"I just dove in from there and the generational curses and giving to the relationship of father and son and what that does to their relationship and the aftermath of what happened in 'Insidious 2.' You're dealing with a lot of very heavy subjects, but there's really no better genre to explore that than horror, because it really becomes very operatic. That's what I love about horror."
Wilson didn't share in the interview which of his personal college experiences will be included in "The Red Door," so a viewer will merely have to postulate. Perhaps the dorms resemble Wilson's own dorms, or perhaps he merely invokes the cutthroat attitudes of his old professors. I would be curious to talk to other Carnegie Mellon graduates from the class of 1995 — as Wilson was — to get their perspective on how accurately he recreated his alma mater on film.
According to IMDb, "The Red Door" was filmed in Morristown, New Jersey, and Atlanta, Georgia, so it seems that Wilson was not able to film on his own school's Pennsylvania campus. It's likely he wanted to.