At a glance
| Director | James Wan |
| Release year | 2010 |
| Runtime | 103 minutes |
| Genre | Supernatural horror |
| Starring | Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye, Ty Simpkins |
Plot
Josh and Renai Lambert move into a new house. Their son Dalton falls from a ladder in the attic and does not wake up. The doctors cannot explain the coma. The house fills with voices anyway. Renai sees a figure. Josh does not want to hear it. His mother, Lorraine, brings in Elise Rainier, a psychic who says Dalton is not in the house. He is somewhere else, and something else wants the body he left.
That somewhere is the Further, a dark version of rooms the living already know. Elise says Josh has been there before, as a child, and had the memory taken. The film sends him back. The demon waiting on Dalton is a red-faced thing in a suit, later called Lipstick-Face. The ending does not restore the family to the life they had at the start.
Production
James Wan directed it from a Leigh Whannell script. They made it after Saw, with a smaller budget and a different kind of scare: no traps, long holds, a face in a corner. The budget was about $1.5 million. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010 and opened in the United States in April 2011. The gross was over $100 million worldwide.
Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne play the parents. Lin Shaye plays Elise, the role the sequels keep. Ty Simpkins is Dalton. Joseph Bishara, who also wrote parts of the score, plays the demon. Wan directed the second film. The later entries are other directors. The series is the one he made between Saw and The Conjuring, and it is the film that proved he could scare an audience without a puzzle.
Cast
- Patrick Wilson as Josh Lambert
- Rose Byrne as Renai Lambert
- Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier
- Ty Simpkins as Dalton Lambert
- Barbara Hershey as Lorraine Lambert
- Leigh Whannell as Specs
- Angus Sampson as Tucker
Trivia
- Whannell plays Specs, one of Elise’s assistants. He also wrote the film.
- The red demon was played by the composer, Joseph Bishara.
- The Tiny Tim song over the titles was a deliberate wrong note for a ghost story.
- “Tip toe through the tulips” is the cue the film uses when the house is already wrong.
- Wan has said he wanted the opposite of Saw: a film you could make in a house.
- Elise’s story continues in the sequels. This film already shows the cost of her work.