Insidious (2010)
James Wan's haunted house story where a comatose boy's spirit is trapped in a dimensional space called the Further. Patrick Wilson plays Josh Lambert.
Writer: Leigh Whannell
Leigh Whannell wrote Saw with James Wan as a low-budget calling card and appeared in it, and the pair then created Insidious, building two franchises from almost no money.
He moved into directing with Upgrade, a lean body-horror action film about a paralysed man controlled by an implant, and then The Invisible Man, which reframed the Universal monster as a story about coercive control and was the better film for it.
The pattern is a genre premise that carries an argument, executed at a budget that leaves room to take the risk.
