INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR

Name: INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR
Item: INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR
Author: Cooper Dowd

"Family Bonds Can Banish Demonic Evil but Movie Could Be Less Occult"

Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

Skip offensive content with

LEARN MORE

Credits →

Watch:

What You Need To Know:

INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR is a sequel to the second INSIDIOUS movie. In INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2, Josh Lambert and his son, Dalton, are hypnotized to have their memories of a demonic world erased. After showing the hypnosis scene, THE RED DOOR opens nine years later. The hypnosis left Josh in a mental fog. He and his wife divorced, and he’s become estranged from his three children, including Dalton, the eldest. As Dalton begins his freshman year at college, a demonic creature from the evil nightmarish world tries to influence Dalton and Josh.

INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR has a uplifting premise of a father rescuing his son from a demonic creature. However, the movie is only partly successful and can be confusing if viewers or horror fans don’t recall the previous movie. Also, INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR is marred by strong occult references to astral projection, scary attacks by a demonic creature from a nightmarish world, and occult appearances by the spirits of three dead people. THE RED DOOR has strong foul language, many scary scenes, violence, and a few lewd innuendoes.

Content:

(PaPa, OO, BB, C, LL, VV, S, AA, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong mixed pagan worldview with a strong occult setting where people use astral projection (sometimes unconsciously) and see manifestations of three dead people, but the movie makes clear that astral projection opens up people to demonic spirits from a nightmarish demonic world, and the living people don’t try to conjure the dead people because the dead people just appear (one apparently dead woman speaks to the male protagonist’s father, who has a vision of his own father about to travel “into the light” of some sort of heaven), mitigated by a strong moral premise that’s slightly redemptive and allegorical where a father is willing to sacrifice his life to save his son from a demonic force that’s been haunting them and that includes a light implication that there’s a heaven waiting for some people, plus there’s a light Christian burial ceremony where a young man quotes Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Foul Language:

21 obscenities (one “f” word, several “s” words and some light obscenities), one GD profanity, three light exclamatory profanities, a scene is set in a demonic world where a male ghost is vomiting a toilet (the scene suggests this is what happened before or when the person died), and a scene is set in that demonic world where the ghost vomits all over a young male protagonist who’s unconsciously astral projecting into that world

Violence:

Scary violence includes a college freshman is accidentally put into a trance by his crazy art teacher, and a demonic hand comes out of the scary picture the student is drawing and slashes the student’s palm, a scary creature visits the college students’ father when the father falls asleep during an MRI test, a demonic creature makes other scary visits to the father and the son as do some other ones, the demonic creature sometime possess the father and the son and make them do bad violent things unless something or someone wakes them, some visions of dead bodies, some scary jump scares occur when the demonic creature’s scary face suddenly appears, a female college student is strangled into unconsciousness, the art student keeps drawing a scary red door picture, and the image of a person starts to appear in later scenes until the person’s identity is revealed, scary flashback of a father chasing and trying to kill his young son, but there’s a positive resolution, some images of blood, and father and son visit scary demonic realm more than once, but the question is whether they can defeat the demonic creature lurking there together

Sex:

Some lewd verbal references to sex designed, apparently, to get some laughs, plus college-age female kisses her college-age male friend when they are discovered snooping through a fraternity man’s room, and she pretends they were just trying to find a quiet private place to make out and fornicate

Nudity:

No nudity

Alcohol Use:

Alcohol use and light drunken partying at a fraternity house

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Young man and woman snoop around the personal rooms of college students at a fraternity house, troubled father is divorced from his children’s mother, and father is estranged from his children, especially his eldest son, but the story offers viewers hope about a positive resolution.

More Detail:

INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR is a direct sequel to the second INSIDIOUS movie, where Josh Lambert and his son, Dalton, were hypnotized to have their memories of a nightmarish demonic world erased, but nine years later, a demonic creature from that world tries to influence them when Dalton begins his freshman year at college. INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR is only partly successful and can be confusing if you don’t recall the previous movie, and the movie’s morally uplifting premise of a father rescuing his son is marred by occult references to astral projection, scary attacks by a demonic creature from a nightmarish world, occult appearances by the spirits of three dead people, strong foul language, scary violence, and a few lewd innuendoes.

The movie opens with a paranormal psychologist hypnotizing Josh and a young Dalton to forget about the past year where a demonic creature from a nightmarish demonic world tried to possess Josh and force him to kill Dalton. In the second INSIDIOUS movie, INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2, Josh and then Dalton had grown up having a paranormal, occult ability to astral project their spirits. The ability placed them in contact, however, with a nightmarish world of demonic spirits and ghosts. With help from Dalton, Josh fought off a demonic spirit, but the psychologist advises them to have their memories erased by hypnosis.

Nine years later, however, Josh and his wife have divorced. Apparently, the hypnosis left Josh’s psyche in a fog that alienated him from his wife and their three children, including Dalton. The burial of Josh’s mother has brought the family back together, but Dalton still feels estranged from Josh.

However, a few days later, Dalton agrees to let Josh drive him to start his freshman year at college. The trip doesn’t go well when they get to Dalton’s dorm room, and some words are exchanged. While driving back home, Josh decides to get some help for his feelings, which haven’t been the same since the hypnosis session, which neither Josh nor Dalton remember.

Josh undergoes an MRI. Meanwhile, in Dalton’s art class, the quirky teacher has her students get in touch with their unconscious by counting down from 10. Both Josh and Dalton suffer a demonic attack in these scenes. The MRI doctor tells Josh that he fell asleep. Dalton drew a disturbing picture of a red door.

The demonic attacks continue during the rest of the movie. Sometimes, the attacks manifest visions of a demonic creature from the nightmarish world that Josh and Dalton visited nine years ago. Dalton gets help from a beautiful black coed for the strange attacks. However, she puts her own life in danger when it seems like the demon is trying to possess Dalton and cause him to murder someone. Eventually, Josh gets help from his ex-wife to monitor him while he tries to astral project and help their son.

INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR has a morally uplifting premise of a father rescuing his son from a demonic creature living in an evil, nightmarish world. As such, the movie partly resembles the Greek myth of Orpheus who went to Hades to rescue Eurydice. THE RED DOOR also has interesting themes about the nature of dreams versus reality and the nature of art and creation. As in many horror movies featuring demonic characters, the protagonists are trying to banish the insidious external evil that’s trying to invade and corrupt their souls, spirits or psyches and, by extension, the real world where they live.

That said, the movie is only partly successful and can be confusing if viewers or horror fans don’t recall the previous movie. In addition, the movie’s third act should have been more involving, perhaps by replacing some jump scares with more compelling scenes.

INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR is also marred by strong occult references to astral projection, scary attacks by a demonic creature from a nightmarish world, and occult appearances by the spirits of three dead people. This occult content is mitigated by the movie’s warning that astral projection can leave people open to demonic influences. Also, the people in the movie don’t try to conjure the spirits of dead people. Instead, visions of the ghosts just appear to them. THE RED DOOR lightly suggests in two scenes, however, that there’s some kind of heaven after death.

Finally, INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR contains strong foul language, many scary scenes, violence, and a few lewd innuendoes.

Overall, therefore, despite its positive pro-family premise that strong family bonds can overcome evil, INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR has too much objectionable content. As a result, MOVIEGUIDE® labels the movie unacceptable.

Bottom Line? The occult content in THE RED DOOR is too strong, and the moral content could have been stronger.