In the opening scene where Elise tries to contact the dead when she's in the bedroom
with her brother, she ends up summoning a demon who appears on the bed behind her for
a fraction of a second.
This appears to be a younger version of the lipstick faced demon, who years later becomes
the driving force behind the Lambert haunting in the original Insidious.
We also see a small horse figurine in the room, which resembles the one found in Lipstick
Face's lair in The Further.
Horses may just be a recurring element in The Further, as we see them in Parker Crane's
room as well.
Elise and Christian's room also have a toy monkey, which we also see many of in Parker's
room.
I have a theory on how Elise may have allowed the Lambert incident to begin due to her actions
in the The Last Key, which I'll get back to later on in this video.
Elise's father is often seen plopped in front of the TV.
But if you pay attention to what he's watching, it says a lot about his character.
First he's seen watching a documentary about Joseph Stalin and Marxism.
I never paid much attention in history class, but I do know that Stalin was a communist
dictator back in the USSR and Marxism was an ideology that was the basis for communism.
If you think about it, his household is a communist dictatorship, where he is the dictator.
In fact, when he punishes Elise, the mother begs him not to go hard on her, but he says,
"don't tell me how to punish her, I punish people for a living."
He also forces Elise to to ignore her psychic gift and lie about the existence of spirits
in their house because she's the only one with this ability and in communism, everything
is controlled by the state, or in this case, her father, and everyone's contribution must
be equal.
So he tries to force Elise to dumb herself down so that she can't use this power that
her brother doesn't have, which is a method used by communist leaders to keep people in
line and prevent an uprising.
Another one of the programs he watches is Duck and Cover which was a propaganda film
shown to schoolchildren in the 1950s.
It was supposed to teach them what to do if a nuclear attack hits, but really it was created
to give people a false sense of security as not to raise panic.
I mean, come on, this isn't Attack on Titan, covering your neck would not actually save
you if a bomb went off.
But in many ways Gerald Rainier uses these same tactics on his daughter by forcing Elise
to ignore the presence of the demons in her household.
This way she stays quiet and doesn't create hysteria with her brother and her mom when
these presences are haunting them.
And Gerald knows full-well that these demons exist and knows of their power, because he's
been manipulated by The Man With The Keys, who forces him to keep these women locked
in his basement.
And let's have a closer look at this basement.
It's filled with shelves of canned food, and you can spot a gas mask hanging on the wall.
Maybe this basement is not just a basement, but also a fallout shelter, somewhere you
might go to protect yourself from these communist attacks.
Something that probably works better than Duck and Cover.
This shelter is where Elise is put when she defies her father's orders.
The gas mask could also be a reference to how Elise first learned to communicate with
the beings from The Further, as we see here in the first Insidious.
When she goes back to the basement as an adult, the calendar still reads September 1953, meaning
her father never went back down there after losing his wife.
So the fallout shelter comes to represent a resistance against communism.
In fact, if you look back on major historical events in September 1953, one of the biggest
stories was communist China being rejected from joining United Nations at the request
of another communist nation, the Soviet Union.
Plus, Gerald's prison warden jacket is very reminiscent of something you might see on
a Soviet general in World War II.
There's a scene early on where we see the silhouette of this jacket moving around behind
Elise as she explores the basement, which is an early clue that her father was involved
with the supernatural entities that resided there.
The house is located at 414 Appletree Road in Five Keys, New Mexico.
As mentioned when I talked about the trailer, it's a fictional location, so choices such
as making this welcome sign look like a tombstone are deliberate.
It's kind of hinted that the whole town is filled with malicious ghosts because of the
executions that take place at the large prison facility, which seems to be the main feature
of Five Keys.
One character tells Elise she is lucky to have gotten out of the town; and her niece,
Imogen claims to have also seen these spirits, despite the fact that she never actually visited
the house Elise grew up in.
It seems like the whole town is plagued by these occurrences and Elise's childhood home
has the worst of it due to the close proximity with the prison.
The street address, 414 Appletree Road, could be a reference to this being the fourth movie
in the franchise and leading directly into the first movie.
Early on in The Last Key, Elise mentions that she refuses to go back into The Further, after
a close call while helping out Quinn Brenner, which is a reference to her stand-off with
The Black Bride in Insidious: Chapter 3.
This explains why she will no longer astral project, because she knows the Black Bride
will be there waiting for her if she does.
This is why she's unable to go into The Further and guide Josh when he goes to retrieve Dalton
in Insidious.
In The Last Key, her mother is the one who saves her from The Man With The Keys.
The experience gives her a newfound respect for her mother, so much so that she refuses
to take ownership of her last name from that point forward.
"Please, call me Elise.
Mrs. Rainier was my mother."
It's also where she discovered that The Further doesn't adhere to a linear flow of time.
Elise meets and gives advice to a younger version of herself in this movie, which would
seem to be the first experience she has with The Further bringing together timelines in
the real world.
There's evidence that she knows about this in Insidious, "The Further is a world far
beyond our own, yet it's all around us.
A place without time as we know it," and it plays a much bigger part in Chapter 2 when
Josh does the same thing.
He meets a younger version of himself to help track down the location of The Black Bride.
At the end of Insidious: Chapter 3, Elise joins up with Specs and Tucker, but mentions
that if they're going to go into business together, they'll need to dress nicer.
In this movie, Elise gives them the new clothes, which they subsequently wear in Insidious
and whenever they are on the job in Insidious Chapter 2.
Elise mentions that the clothes are some of Jack's old outfits.
Jack is her deceased husband whose image can be seen in Chapter 3, when The Man Who Can't
Breathe tries to trick her into taking her life by pretending to be Jack.
Sure enough, the outfit he's wearing in this scene matches up with the outfits that Elise
provides Specs and Tucker with, which become part of their signature look in the series
going forward.
It's not entirely clear how much of Elise's father's behaviour is just him being evil,
and how much of it is due to him being controlled by The Man With The Keys.
But we do see evidence that the Key Man's victims may have had some control at some
point.
When Elise returns to the house in 2010 after Ted Garza has moved in, most of the interior
decorations are the same, but Garza has added some religious symbols: a cross on the wall
and many copies of his Holy Bible, which he expresses a belief that it will help Elise
ward off the bad spirits, which seems more like something out of The Exorcist than Insidious,
which is why it doesn't really work.
There's also a nod to another Exorcism movie though.
Elise's dog appears in both this film and the previous film, and his name is Warren.
Ed and Lorraine Warren are Elise's ghost-hunting counterparts in The Conjuring franchise, the
other big 4-film horror series started by James Wan under the Blumhouse banner.
Anna is the woman being kept prisoner in the basement.
When they find her, you may notice that she has a considerable amount of leg hair, suggesting
that she's been trapped down there for a very long time.
When Elise goes to investigate further, she finds the suitcases of at least 4 other women
who were taken prisoner down there.
They each contain information about the person and their skull.
The one thing each victim has in common is that they are all female nurses.
It's never fully explained why this key demon is only interested in nurses, but it does
make me wonder if this is somehow connected to Lorraine Lambert, Josh's mother.
In Chapter 2, the Black Bride first encounters Josh as a child when he is waiting for his
mom to get off work at the hospital, as a nurse.
Parker Crane, who ends up being The Black Bride, attacks Josh, and it's discovered that
one day later, he jumped off the roof of the hospital, killing himself.
Lorraine finds this out after a creepy elevator ride with Parker's ghost...
"Parker?
What are you?
You should be resting, you shouldn't be out of bed.
Listen, I want to apologize for my son the other day.
He was being a nosy kid."
Let me know your thoughts about the whole nurse thing in the comments.
Earlier I mentioned how I think Elise is responsible for the Red Faced Demon getting to Dalton
Lambert in the first movie.
It starts with these red doors, which we learn more about here in The Last Key.
Elise mentions that previously she used a red door to go deeper into The Further.
She's talking about Quinn Brenner's apartment, which is an interesting case, because the
first time she passes through it, she's brought to The Lambert's second house, which she hasn't
even been to yet.
The second time, under the guide of one of the ghosts of the apartment, the same door
takes her to the abandoned 5th floor of the apartment complex, which is the home of The
Man Who Can't Breathe.
In Insidious, Josh passes through a red door to get to The Lipstick Faced Demon's lair.
And in Chapter 2, Josh, Elise and Carl pass through a red door to get to Parker Crane's
childhood room.
In The Last Key, there is another red door, and it leads to the penitentiary where The
Man With The Keys lives, and this is where the final showdown takes place.
So based on the examples we have so far, it looks like red doors typically lead to the
lair of the demon who is haunting that area.
However, it would appear that there are certain cases where a red door will take someone to
another time period, and we see it happen one more time when Elise is on her way back
to the real world in Chapter 4.
She stumbles upon the first Lambert house, and sees Dalton fall off the ladder.
When she goes back through the door, she leaves it open, and the darth maul looking demon
who has been following her all these years sees the chance to go after Dalton and try
to take over his body to get back to the real world, which was his objective all along.
So in many ways, the key-fingered demon, despite being defeated, still accomplished his goal.
He has been trying to get Elise to open all of these doors ever since she was a child
and she opens the one that leads The Lipstick Face demon to Dalton.
The Man With The Keys leaves all these keys around for Elise to open the doors, but at
the end of day, the last key is Elise.
So then the question becomes, why do these doors keep leading Elise back to the Lambert
family?
It could be The Further, or someone in The Further, such as Elise's mother, trying to
show her that this is where she meets her fate, and it is hinted at many times throughout
the four films.
But it doesn't do any good because The Black Bride still ends up getting the better of
Elise at the end of Insidious and the lipstick faced demon is still on the loose at the end
of the continuity that we've seen so far.
So Leigh Whannell, if you're watching this, it's been two movies since that cliffhanger,
I think it's time in Chapter 5 to tie this one up and give us a sequel to Chapter 2.
Whenever that Chapter 5 trailer does drop, you can bet I'll be covering it, until then
remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring that deathbell for
notifications and I'll see you in the next one.
Assuming we both survive.