The Man with Fire on His Face
If you also follow me on social media, then you probably already know that I co-host a monthly podcast called the Horror Pod Class with Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon. You probably also know that we record it live at the Stray Cat Film Center, after hosting a free screening of the movie that we’re talking about that month.
You may even know that last night we screened and discussed Insidious. What you’re less likely to know, unless you’ve been following me for a very long time, is that I’m a big fan of Insidious, and of James Wan’s horror films more broadly. Which is perhaps not unusual, given that they are actually extremely popular, but within horror circles they seem to often be regarded as somehow bad, even by people who should know better.
This is not intended as an apologia for Insidious or Wan, though. I’ve written those before and, frankly, looking at the box office take of pretty much anything the dude has done since Dead Silence, he doesn’t need my help. The purpose of all this is to establish that I have seen Insidious a whole bunch of times before last night, and I’m looking forward to catching the new one in a week or so.
Despite this, I noticed something last night that hadn’t ever clicked for me before. For those who haven’t seen Insidious, the story involves astral projection into a spooky version of the astral plane that the movie calls “the Further.” (Also, the working title of the film.)
Probably for budgetary reasons (even though it looks pretty great, Insidious only cost about a million dollars to make), the Further looks just like the regular world, if the regular world were a Halloween haunted house. Which is to say, it’s darker, and there’s fog everywhere. Also, waxy ghosts.
That is, it looks like that with one exception. The movie is about the Lambert family, and their son Dalton, who is in a coma. Spoilers for a movie that’s over a decade old, but it turns out that he’s in a coma because he has astrally projected and been trapped outside his body, and there are ghosts and things trying to get in. I say “and things,” but it’s mostly ghosts. The one non-ghost thing is a demon that the movie calls “the Man with Fire on His Face,” but that fans and detractors have dubbed, in proper Pinhead fashion, the Lipstick Demon.
The Lipstick Demon lives in a frankly delightful, weird, red-litten lair within the Further, on the other side of a red door (red doors become extremely important in the series, to the extent that the new, fifth and final film, is subtitled The Red Door). He has decorated this lair to his liking, including chandeliers, a sculpture of a horse, a carnival mask, and some nice marionettes. He’s also got a grindstone in there where he can sharpen his cool metal claw while listening to Tiny Tim, as one does.
For the longest time – until last night – I regarded the demon’s lair as the one part of the Further that wasn’t simply an analogue to some part of the Lamberts’ house, tied to the experiences of the person journeying in it. Which makes sense. Unlike the ghosts who inhabit the Further, the demon is presumably native to there. Why would he not have a nice house of his own?
It was only last night that I realized that, while the demon’s lair is different from the rest of the Further, it also isn’t entirely separate from the reflections of the Lamberts’ house that make up the rest of the plane. Instead of being a room inside the house, as the rest of the Further is, it is the inside of their furnace.
When Dalton first encounters the Lipstick Demon, he is in the attic of the house, next to the furnace. Earlier, his mother was drawn up there as well, and spooked when the furnace kicked on. When his father ventures into the Further to rescue him from the demon, he passes through a Further version of the house, but when he reaches the attic, the furnace is gone. In its place is that red door.
Beyond it, the demon’s lair is red-lit, as I mentioned, and massive, like the inside of a cathedral. But the demon’s personal little redoubt, where he sharpens his claws and listens to his jams, is up behind a baroque window – a window that echoes the shape of the furnace’s grating.
So, the demon’s lair is both a unique space and a size-distorted space within their home, which I found delightful, adding yet another check to the list of reasons why I like this movie quite a lot, and always will, regardless of anyone else’s thoughts on it.
