Insidious: Chapter 3 Is All Jumps, No Real Scares

The first promotional poster for Insidious: Chapter 3 consisted solely of red text against a gray background:

“The man who can't breathe, the man who lives in the vents, I heard him saying your name last night. I heard him in your room, while you were gone. He's in there right now. Standing in your room.”

The disembodied warning—rhythmic, unassuming, banal—somehow manages to instantly conjure up dread with no audiovisual effects, just a kind of poetic simplicity. Unfortunately, the rest of the film has no interest in the effectiveness of such subtlety.

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