Insidious

                                                                     Insidious

In “Insidious,” their latest attempt to go straight, the “Saw” team of James Wan (director) and Leigh Whannell (writer) avoid almost completely the gore and mechanized instruments of torture on which they built their careers. The results are mixed.

For about half its length “Insidious,” a haunted-house picture starring Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson as embattled parents facing shadowy presences in their new home, is a suggestive bump-in-the-night thriller with a few honest scares. It relies too heavily on sound effects and Joseph Bishara’s almost comically foreboding music to make up for pedestrian camerawork, but it still shows Mr. Wan aspiring to the kind of B-movie auteurship represented by Joseph Ruben (“The Stepfather”) or Jack Clayton (“The Innocents”).

Then, with the arrival of a pair of geeky ghostbusters (Mr. Whannell and Angus Sampson), whose tools include antique cameras and vintage View-Masters, it becomes an entirely different and less interesting film. What had been an eerie ghost story becomes a literal-minded, overexplained, jokily self-referential demonic procedural — in other words, a run-of-the-mill 21st-century horror movie.

The suddenly frenetic action is matched by a riot of visual references to Japanese horror, Wes Craven and David Lynch, but the strongest analogue for the second half of “Insidious” is one that the filmmakers probably weren’t trying for: it feels like a less poetic version of an M. Night Shyamalan fairy tale. 

“Insidious” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Scary stuff and bloodless violence.