Insidious Chapter Three brings back the ghost hunter hero Elise Rainier, and
we learn more about her backstory, what happened to her husband, and we meet
her dog, Warren.
-[Elise] It's okay, Warren.
-[Elise] Go upstairs.
In my previous Insidious analysis videos, I've discussed the connections
between the Insidious franchise and the Conjuring franchise.
From camerawork to Easter eggs to character names, Elise is basically the
Insidious equivalent of the psychic Lorraine Warren from the Conjuring.
So I think her dog was given the name Warren in honor of Lorraine, since
they already used the name Lorraine for a different Insidious character.
To learn about all of the movie secrets, stick around to the end of this video.
♪ Metal Music ♪
Welcome to Things You Missed.
The third chapter of the Insidious franchise takes us back before the
original, where a then retired Elise is approached by Quinn Brenner, who
wants to contact her deceased mother, but accidentally reaches something far
more... Unsidious.
James Wan, the director of Insidious One and Two, was busy making a
Fast and Furious sequel.
So the screenwriter Leigh Whannel got the call up to direct
his first feature film.
Side story, I love chapter three.
And when I was taking my notes for this episode, I was thinking about how
I've seen this movie so many times.
This scene where Quinn hears noises in the night isn't going to be as scary.
She hears someone moving around in the vacant apartment upstairs.
And right as that happened, I heard someone walking around upstairs from me,
which was slightly creepy, and it distracted me enough to where I actually
got jump scared by the bell.
And apparently, I was not the only one who experienced something unexpected
with this scene.
-[Stefanie] There's a scene with a bell that's supposed to wake me up, and we rehearsed
-[Stefanie] it a few times, and by the time we shot it for the first time, he puts this
-[Stefanie] air horn on.
-[Stefanie] It scared me so bad.
-[Stefanie] I mean, I guess he got the reaction he wanted.
I always find it cool when the director finds a way to get real reactions
from the actors.
Anyway, I've got some things you might have missed, so let's get into them.
(Air Horn)
♪ Mysterious Music ♪
Quinn's room is filled with decorations, some of which are the high school
play she's been in and also a lot of band merch.
Her favorites seem to be Pixies.
She wears a Pixie's shirt, has two stickers on her door and one on her
bookcase. The other is The Cure.
There are two stickers on her door and a poster on her wall.
I wondered if her interest in these bands could be because of her mom, who
is stated to have loved vinyl records and old music.
This is kind of confirmed in a deleted scene where Quinn and her friend find
her dad's memory box that includes all of his keepsakes from his
relationship with her mom, including a ticket to see The Cure from 1980.
The scene may also explain why Quinn is interested in pursuing theater and
why her dad is afraid of letting her go.
This note explains that Quinn's mom once traveled away to pursue her dreams,
and it was hard on her dad, which would give additional context to this line.
-[Sean] I see her every single day when I look at you.
All of these little details show how important Quinn's mom was to her and
help make the ending, where her spirit helps save her daughter even more impactful.
I also found it interesting that in the Further, Quinn's room is
completely barren and undecorated.
Maybe a sign that the entity that she's been encountering to that point was
not her mother.
The lines that Quinn is rehearsing for her audition say you'll go to the end
of the world and you'll find me waiting there.
You gave me life when I was dying, when I was leaving this world.
This describes how Lily rescued Quinn from having her soul taken by the
Man Who Can't Breathe at the end.
The play is called Separated by Lights by Bailey Conway.
In Insidious, the real world is sometimes referred to as the light, whereas
the Further, where Quinn's mom is, is the dark.
Bailey Conway is also the name of one of the film's co-producers.
Speaking of crew reference Easter Eggs, James Wan has a cameo as the
director of the theater school.
Another familiar face is this woman that Elise talks to in the Further.
This is Leigh Whannel's wife, Corbett Tuck, who also played two small parts in
the first Insidious.
Another tie-in to the previous movies is the return of Specs and Tucker, who
have their own web series called Spectral Sightings.
Queen's brother Alex is a fan.
On his computer monitor, you can see the URL spectralsightings.com.
At the time, this was a real website that you could go to.
It seems like it was mostly used to promote Insidious: Chapter Two.
The post contained some field videos with Specs and Tucker,
and some interviews with Specs, Tucker and Elise.
There's nothing substantial here, and the events of the videos, which take
place before the beginning of chapter one, are rendered non-canon by the
events of chapter three.
So it's weird that they decided to highlight the URL in chapter three.
Not one of the better viral marketing efforts I've seen.
I'm not sure why Alex is such a fan.
-[Alex] Showed him that one where you guys get the ghost out of that one hotel.
-[Alex] The boiler room ghost.
-[Alex] That was a good one.
This line could be a reference to The Shining, which features a hotel full
of ghosts and a very important plot line about the boiler room in the book.
Leigh and his wife are clearly fans of Stanley Kubrick, the
director of the film adaptation of The Shining.
Kubrick also directed an adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, which Quinn can
be seen reading in bed.
The reason she ends up bedridden is because she got struck down by a car
while staring at the Man Who Can't Breathe in the hospital.
The EKG machine has the date for August 2014, which is obviously a mistake
because this movie takes place around 2007.
There's a similar mistake on her laptop later on, where the date is July 24, 2014
but as she's being treated at the emergency room, there's an
Easter egg in a deleted scene.
If you look at the doctor's badge, it says Our Lady of the Angels.
This is the same hospital where Parker Crane attacked Josh Lambert in a
flashback in Insidious Two. The characters go back there in the present
during that second film, and it's now abandoned, meaning that it closed down
shortly after the third chapter.
Or maybe the hospital that Quinn stays at is a new location that they moved to.
During her treatment, she slips into the Further and sees the demon,
suggesting that she has the same traveling ability that Dalton Lambert had.
There's another character in Quinn's building who also seems to have this ability.
Her neighbor Grace describes the Man Who Can't Breathe living in
the vents.
-[Grace] He's up there right now, standing in your room. You will see him.
But her ramblings are treated as a part of her dementia.
When she passes away, her husband expresses how he tried to tell her how
much she meant to him before she was gone.
It an important scene because Harry is one of three characters in the movie
who has to deal with this kind of grief.
Quinn's main objective in the film is to talk to her mother again, so she
can say all of the things she never got a chance to say.
And Elise goes through something similar with her late husband, Jack, who
she never got to say goodbye to.
The message is clear the life that you spend with your loved ones is what's
important, and you can't spend your life in depression, ruminating over your losses.
At the beginning of the movie, Elise is in retirement, afraid to use
her gift after what happened to her husband.
Quinn, after losing her mom and getting disabled by a motorist, has also
fallen into a depression, claiming that she can no longer taste food.
When Elise sees her in the state and inspires her to come out of retirement
to help the girl. Un this movie, Quinn's depression takes a
physical form in the Further.
As the demon slowly takes her soul, we see a deformed version of her appear
alongside it.
This version of Quinn has no eyes, mouth, hands or feet.
But as Quinn loses her will to live, the Man Who Can't Breathe absorbs more
of her soul.
And this second, Quinn gains more features, like a mouth, and eventually
hands and everything else.
It's a good visual representation of how far along she is to being
possessed, something we don't really have.
In the first Insidious, it was up to Elise to come out of her shell to save
Quinn, who still had so much to live for.
-[Elise] Everybody's going to die one day.
-[Elise] I think it is high time for me to get out of my house while I'm still alive.
And she does all of this despite knowing that if she comes back to the
Further, there's an even darker presence waiting for her in the shadows.
(Thunder)
♪ Mysterious Music ♪
One evening, Elise slips through her Book of Seeing, and if we go frame by frame,
you can see stories of some kind of blue fairy and a wicked castle.
I'm not sure what that's about.
Probably one of her past cases.
But what's interesting is this part, scribbled in thick, black crayon.
It says, you should have never come here to the place where I live.
The dark is going to kill you.
I have killed many more times, and many children hear screams.
I would assume that this is something told to Elise by the Bride in Black,
an antagonist from the first and second Insidious, who would eventually be
the one to take her life.
When she visits the Further to try to help Quinn, the elevator takes her
somewhere unfamiliar to her.
This is the second house that the Lambert family lives in Insidious One.
The Further is capable of showing different points in
time, and we're actually looking into the future.
The Lamberts do not live here yet, but we can see a family photo on top of
Renai's piano.
Elise is essentially being shown a premonition of her death, which makes her
look even more brave in the original movie, because she goes to that house
knowing that she's most likely going to die.
As further proof, she comes across this woman, who we've never met before,
but is listed in the credits as Lambert Woman, who points to the living room and says this.
-[Lambert Woman] I always wanted to know how I would go.
-[Lambert Woman] Tell me friend, how I meet my end.
And this is the armchair where Elise would meet her end three years later.
There are other examples of retroactive foreshadowing.
The way the Man Who Can't Breathe appears in Quinn's window is similar to
the long haired fiend from the first movie.
During Carl's lunch with Elise, he gives her some important advice for
fighting the Bride and Black.
-[Carl] All right, you're stronger than her.
-[Carl] You're alive.
This would be the same advice that Elise would go on to give Josh during his
journey into the Further.
After this first encounter with the supernatural, Tucker can be seen icing
his leg, which may call back to Specs nursing his injuries in the first one.
On the topic of Specs, he finds a way to make himself
useful to the team.
-[Elise] What's your contribution?
-[Tucker] This should be good. -[Specs] It's not good.
-[Specs] It's great.
-[Specs] It's our blog.
-[Specs] I'm the writer of it.
It's definitely not that good, as we've seen.
But it is a fun fourth wall break because Leigh Whannel is literally the writer
of this trilogy of movies.
Specs and Tucker have their own van, and the license plate looks like this.
There's a double meaning here.
It reads as Specter, the thing that they're hunting.
But it also contains both of their names Specs and Tucker.
There's also a little bit of insight about the technology they use.
Tucker has a wireless display with switches at the bottom labeled Tesla and Gauss.
These are both units of measurement.
Tesla is used to define magnetic flux density, which has something to do
with electromagnetic fields.
Paranormal researchers and ghost hunters believe ghosts can generate
electromagnetic fields of their own, which is why ghosts in movies are often
associated with flickering lights or malfunctioning electronics.
Gauss is another unit of magnetic flux density.
Both are named after scientists Nikola Tesla and Carl Friedrich Gauss.
The movie seems to be telling us that this interpretation is correct,
because when Quinn starts to be possessed by the Man Who Can't Breathe, we
see the lights begin to flicker.
This entity, however, is far more capable than just producing
electromagnetic fields.
After Elise is attacked in her reading room, you can spot this tear in her
sweater as if something is flashed through it.
In my videos on Insidious One and Two, I discussed how these movies took
after the first and second Poltergeist films.
So does Insidious: Chapter Three
Follow the trend and
pay homage to Poltergeist Three? Other than the fact
that both movies take place in a multiunit complex, not really.
Thank God.
There is a nice moment in Insidious where Quinn and Alex get too impatient
waiting for the elevator and opt to take the stairs instead.
A nice setup for when Quinn gets captured and trapped on the uninhabited
fifth floor.
And due to her wheelchair, the elevator is her only avenue of escape.
Knowing the elevator is slow really adds to the suspense.
So that's Insidious: Chapter Three.
But what about its sequel,
Insidious: The Last key?
Well, I actually did that video five years ago when the movie came out, and
it actually still holds up pretty decently if you can deal with 24 year old
me talking like a creepy pasta narrator the whole time.
Then on the left for you to check out, go in the comments and pay your
respects to Baby CZ.
And if you want to see my analysis of Insidious Five, which is almost here,
then make sure you subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week.
Ring the Deathbell for all notifications.
Yep, just like that.
And I will see you in the next one, assuming we both survive.