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A seemingly haunted home, a comatose child and an investigator of the supernatural. You can tell this story using expensive CG, loud music, a lot of violence and blow up $30 million.
You can also create a classy horror film, make room for human drama, and spend barely $1.5 million.
Producer Oran Peli, known for the phenomenal Paranormal Activity films, and director James Wan went for the latter with Insidious.
Based on a screenplay by Leigh Whanell (who also appears in the movie), Insidious is an old fashioned film with no stars, though it has veteran Barbara Hershey in an important role. The film, made on a shoestring budget, is doing relatively well for a horror film in its fifth week. We can expect it to be around for at least two months. Now playing in America and Canada, it is going to open abroad in the next few weeks.
In what initially appears to be a haunted-house horror film, Insidious soon turns out to be about a haunted boy. It is the comatose young boy whose body is overtaken by evil while the family moves from one home to another in misguided hope of leaving the bad spirits behind them. They soon realise that they cannot live in peace unless the the evil leaves the kid's body.
The persistent success story of Insidious sounds even sweeter in the context of a good weekend for new movies and good collections for a number of older films.
The delightful 3D toon Rio which did excellent business grossing an estimated $40 million in three days in North America over the weekend is grabbing the most attention. With its worldwide gross reaching $168 million in 12 days, Rio has set the cash registers ringing, becoming a huge hit.
Scream 4, which had a decent opening with $19 million in North America and about $18 million in two dozen countries outside America, is also picking up gradually.
But the ongoing success of Insidious despite minimal publicity and carried from week to week by mostly strong word of mouth has given the term sleeper hit a new lease of life.
In its third weekend, the film has grossed about $6.8 million and its decline from the previous week is just about 25 percent. Horror films usually fall by about 40 percent week by week. While it won't fly beyond $100 million like Rio, it is expected to gross at least $60 million in North America alone. And that should make it one of the most successful films of the decade comparing its earning to its cost. It may even make more money than Scream 4 which cost about $40 million to produce.
Though director Wan and screenwriter Whanell made the hugely successful Saw in 2004, their new film is very different from their first big hit. Insidious is a horror film without screaming violence or sensational twists. It crawls under your skin with medium voltage and continues to scare you till the end without many distractions.
'If Insidious breaks out, we could be looking at a gross in the mid-teens," Entertainment Weekly wrote the week the film opened. 'But I think the film will hover around $10 million, which will nonetheless be a commendable debut for such an inexpensive project.'