Tony Earnshaw: Why horror will always come back from dead

A confident James Wan, director of Saw, nails his colours firmly to the mast. But Wan and writer Leigh Whannell looked way beyond the standard big studio product when they made their joint pitch to make Insidious.

Given that they were talking to the producing triumvirate behind the smash hit Paranormal Activity, perhaps their enthusiasm for the genre helped them along. Yet increasingly erudite young filmmakers are looking to the past for their inspiration. Wan and Whannell, both 34, are no different from a range of fanboys who have transformed their love of movies into actually doing the job.

I am reminded of Alejandro Amenabar, the young Spaniard who resurrected the English ghost story 10 years ago in The Others. “I wanted to do something more sophisticated,” he told me in 2001. “Many Hollywood pictures now are not even scary. That is unforgivable. You could expect from a horror movie to be damp, but not boring.”

Amenabar eschewed special effects for the kind of atmosphere present in British masterpieces like Jack Clayton’s The Innocents. Flash forward a decade and Wan and Whannell are echoing his sentiments.

“I didn’t want to make a blood and guts horror movie,” says Wan firmly. “I really concentrated on elements that were scary and creepy, but that didn’t rely on gore. So I watched a lot of older black and white movies that were creepy with an unsettling tone, such as Carnival of Souls and The Innocents, and studied old black and white photographs. A haunted house movie beckoned. I approached Leigh and asked him if we could do one that would twist the conventions. We came up with something that we were both super-excited about. It starts out as a traditional ghost story and then spirals into something completely different.”

The Wan/Whannell partnership follows in the wake of other young filmmakers who broke new ground in the dim and distant past. George A Romero was not 30 when he made Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Ditto Tobe (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) Hooper was barely into his thirties when he made his 1974 opus – loosely based on the activities of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin cannibal killer who also inspired Robert Bloch’s Psycho.

But that’s a different part of the genre. Wan and Whannell resemble one-hit wonders Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, the duo behind The Blair Witch Project. It’s a cyclical process, with each new generation feeding on the ones that came earlier.

What is refreshing is hearing their obvious love of the genre. Like Amenabar, who scared the living daylights out of American audiences used to Grand Guignol gore and all its sticky trappings, Wan and Whannell looked to the sound and fear of the bogeyman.

Says Whannell: “Jaws seeped into my brain like a nightmarish worm. As I got older, I discovered films that created a sense of true dread. I was always more desperate to see horror films that scared me rather than simply shocked me with gory prosthetics. A truly scary film is a very rare diamond these days. If I can add a film to that list for our fans, then I will be very happy. I want them to feel that this was a return to a serious horror film – something that feels like it came out of the ‘70s.”

Like The Amityville Horror and The Entity, both of which were based on allegedly true-life episodes, Insidious is drawn from supernatural stories that Wan and Whannell claim happened to them, their families and friends. “Technically, I can say Insidious is based on true events. Pretty much all the really creepy stuff in the film is drawn from experiences around us… and they’re stories that would send chills up your spine,” says Wan. “I want [fans] to enjoy it for what it is: a creepy old-fashioned chiller that pays loving homage to the movies we grew up with, but at the same time coming up with unique elements that they don’t get from the mainstream studios.

“I hope I get their support. It means a lot to me that the horror community sees and acknowledges that there are filmmakers out there fighting the system to try and make something fresh, unique and not just another sequel or remake.

“The first horror movie I saw was Poltergeist and it scarred me for life. And then as I grew up, I got to really appreciate The Exorcist. Someone described Insidious as ‘Poltergeist meets The Exorcist on acid’. I’ll take that.”

Insidious (15) is on general release from today.