Songs in the Key of Death

Now that we’ve seen Insidious: The Last Key (2018), that wraps up the Elise Quadrilogy. We will miss her.

It starts with a nightmare Elise is having about her childhood. She is woken by a phone call asking her for help with a haunting. She turns the request down (as she so often does) because the house being haunted is her old house!

Of course, she realizes that she will need to go there to get closure, and sets off by bus to her childhood home in New Mexico. The house was next to a prison, where her abusive father worked. He would beat her when young Elise saw ghosts. Her brother was so traumatized that their mother gave him a whistle to blow when he needed help. One time, when her father locked her in the basement, she accidentally released a demon that killed their mother. At this point, Elise fled, leaving the brother and father behind.

Once she starts checking out the house, she finds the whistle, and it leads her to a hidden room, where a girl is chained up. It seems the guy who owns the house is a serial murderer, and now has to kill them. Specs and Tucker save the day, and the police take down the killer.

But that’s not the end of it. Elise still has to lay the demon with keys for fingers that haunts this place. And it all ends with a vision of the start of the first movie.

All of these movies have sort of disjointed, rambling plots. But they are held together by a decent metaphysics, the comic relief of Specs and Tucker (Leigh Wannell and Angus Sampson) and the indomitable Lin Shaye as Elise. We’ll miss her.

Now, what other James Wan movies are worth watching? We won’t be watching Saw, but how about Conjuring?