The Best Scene In 'Insidious: Chapter 3' Shows How Scares Can Serve A Story

Set a few years before Elise's fateful encounter with the Lambert family, the gifted psychic has retired her work and lives a reclusive life in mourning of the recent loss of her husband. When teen Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott) shows up at her door for help in contacting her deceased mother, Elise reluctantly agrees though halts her contact when she senses the presence of a malevolent entity. That entity haunts Quinn with increasingly disturbing regularity and force, putting Quinn and her family in dire danger. Elise will have to leave retirement behind and enter The Further once more to save them.

Quinn tries to fall asleep on the couch, but cracks forming in the ceiling sprinkles debris. She pulls her blanket up over her face to protect it. Sensing a shift, she pulls the blanket back down to discover she's no longer in her apartment living room but the corridor of the floor above. It's rendered creepier by the fact that this floor is supposed to be uninhabited and empty. She tries to wheel herself to the elevator to escape, but The Man Who Can't Breathe traps her in his room, terrorizing her with a featureless doppelganger. Quinn's screams and pounding on the floor, too immobile to run, wakes Sean. He runs up to the floor, sees the same tar-like footprints Elise spotted in her home, and follows them straight past Quinn to the room's window. He looks out and sees the man splayed out on the concrete below, relieved that Quinn's captor is no longer a threat. He ducks his head back in the room, letting Quinn see for herself that her nightmare is over. When she does, The Man Who Can't Breathe pops up and grabs ahold of her, attempting to pull her out of the window to her doom and making for one significant jump scare in the process.While Whannell crafts no shortage of visceral jump scares and spine-tingling moments in his debut, this scene stands out for several reasons. In terms of narrative, it's the first time Sean sees The Man Who Can't Breathe; before the footprints, he was blissfully unaware that a supernatural presence lurked within the building, targeting his daughter. That makes this a significant turning point, transitioning the story into the third act as Sean immediately seeks outside help after this encounter. It's also an excellent use of misdirection. Whannell first established the eerie footprints in Elise's home, guiding her through her house and into the darkened basement. There, the footprints trail up the wall onto the ceiling, triggering a jump scare as Elise looks up, and the demonic man pops out at her from above. It conditions the viewer on what to expect when the tarry footpath appears. When Sean sees them in that empty hallway, it immediately puts the viewer on edge because it signals a scare is imminent. It's only a matter of when. Sean's sigh of relief at the body laid out on the sidewalk floors below lowers our guard just enough for The Man Who Can't Breathe to jolt us out of complacency as he attempts to harm Quinn once more. However, those footprints don't just instill expectations but doubles as a call to action for our heroine, Elise. The demonic entity may have meant to scare her away from aiding Quinn, but it underestimated the plucky psychic and her fighting spirit. That the footprints appear again to herald in a critical scare works to dovetail Elise's arc with Quinn's. Jump scares tend to get a bad reputation, mainly when employed as a cheap gimmick without any real payoff. A good scare is never easy to execute. They're essential to horror, though, because they work as a pressure release valve. A quick scare will puncture the palpable tension in a scene, alleviating that tension and giving the viewer a moment to catch their breath. This scene encapsulates that perfectly, but Whannell takes it to another level by giving this scare narrative purpose.