After a pair of prequels focusing on Lin Shaye's paranormal investigator, Insidious: The Red Door brings the series back to its original story thread: the Lambert family and the spooky ghosts who haunt them. This is a direct sequel to the second Insidious film--the third and fourth were prequels--picking up a decade later with Dalton (Ty Simpkins) all grown up and heading off to college, where he's about to meet some familiar malevolent spirits.

When I tell you that Insidious: The Red Door is a direct sequel to the second film, I'm saying this is not just another ghost story featuring the Lamberts that takes place after the last one. The Red Door is all about unpacking the trauma of those past events and actually trying to deal with them. That's a big deal--it's rare for horror sequels to be this concerned with ongoing stories like this. And it's that level of care that makes Insidious: The Red Door worth watching.

In the second film--which was released in 2013--the dad, Josh (Patrick Wilson, making his directorial debut with The Red Door), was possessed by the ghost of a serial killer called The Bride in Black, who had haunted him since childhood. The Bride made him try to kill his family, but in the end it was young Dalton (Ty Simpkins, who reprises the role as an adult in The Red Door) who braved the spirit realm and returned Josh to his body. To both bury the trauma of the event and hopefully prevent more incursions by ghosts, both Josh and Dalton were hypnotized and forced to forget every memory they had of these evil spirits.