How A Bawdy Tom Hanks Comedy Influenced ‘Insidious: The Red Door’

Insidious: The Red Door, the fifth film in a horror franchise that has grossed over $542 million at the worldwide box office, is full of surprises. However, they’re not just the kind that will have audiences jumping out of their seats.

Patrick Wilson, returning in the film’s lead role of Josh Lambert, also makes his directorial debut with the direct sequel to 2013’s Insidious: Chapter 2. As well as drawing inspiration from the genre and the franchise’s lore, he was also influenced by a string of 80s comedies, including Tom Hanks’ bawdy romp Bachelor Party and the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito hit Twins.

“What can I say? You write what you know and what you love,” he confessed, laughing. “Those specific moments in the movie, I do have to admit, were me. WGA, please don’t come after me, but they were. Something about 80s movies and the college movies of that decade, especially, defined the era for people like me. I always will come out with some random 80s quote.”

“The character Nick the D**k was a reference to Bachelor Party, and the line, ‘Tonight is your night, bro,’ was from Twins. Because I used that, I had to credit words and music by Danny DeVito, which makes me so happy. It’s true. Look in the song credits at the movie. It’s there.”

Wilson also admitted that a reference to the classic 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School made the final cut. However, not all of his ideas were so lucky.

“My original concept for the end of the movie song was ‘Dream Warriors’ by Dokken, which was featured at the end of A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” the actor-director explained. “However, I kept thinking that I wanted a song like that but not that one exactly because I don’t think people would get it unless they’re a 50-year-old white guy like me. I also knew I couldn’t do that because I didn’t want it to be a joke. I still liked the idea of a rock band doing a song I could sing with, which we have in the final film, but it’s from the early 90s instead.”

Wilson ended up settling on a cover of “Stay” by Shakespears Sister, which he does sing himself.

Another big decision for him was accepting the challenge of stepping behind the camera for the first time.

“It was my agent who had the idea,” Wilson revealed. “At that time, the movie was only something like a 20-page outline, but he said, ‘Listen, they asked if you want to be in this movie, but what would you want to direct it?’ At first, I was like, ‘Oh, no. I don’t know if I wanted to step into James Wan’s shoes.’ However, that went away after about 24 hours, and I started to see it as a perfect opportunity and an incredible gift I was being given.”

“I was like, ‘This is a movie that will be seen in theaters, that has a built-in franchise that the studio really loves, and they want to inject some new blood into it. I took the kernel of the story and said, Well, if I were to do it, this is the kind of movie I’d want to make. I pitched out some ideas, and they said that sounds great.’ We then hired Scott Teems, who flew to me in New Jersey and said, ‘Okay, what kind of movie do you want to make? What do you want to say?'”

He continued, “We just started going through it. He came back six months later, and I was like, ‘Oh, you did it. You wrote exactly what I wanted to say.’ I would go off and do acting jobs for the next two and a half years, but I was constantly thinking about and refining this movie. It was a great process.”

When the time came, Wilson enjoyed the experience of directing but admitted it was “a lot.”

“You’re wearing a couple of hats trying to figure out how physically this will work,” he recalled. “It’s something that is done frequently by other people, so it’s not like, ‘Oh my God. This is wild. An actor has never directed before.’ Once we got our rhythm, it was exciting. As an actor, I’ve always been very technically aware of where the camera is, what the lens size is, what we need, what the coverage is, what’s in the shot, and what is needed for a scene, so I had that. The transition, technically speaking, wasn’t extremely difficult.”

Insidious: The Red Door is the first film in the franchise to brave the highly competitive summer box office real estate of July, where it is going up against such highly anticipated films as Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Barbie, and Oppenheimer.

“It’s the biggest Insidious film in terms of scope and design,” Wilson enthused. “I love a challenge and jumping in feet or headfirst, whichever way is more uncomfortable. I was down for the challenge. That’s what I wanted.”

“I loved when The Conjuring came out in the summer, and people said, ‘A horror movie can’t come out in the summer,’ but then it landed in theaters and $2.1 billion and a franchise later, there you are. To come out in July, between these major tent poles, I was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ If you’re going to go forward, go hard, and go at it.”

Something scarier for the multihyphenate artist than the summer box office landscape was ensuring the horror franchise delivered shocks, but they didn’t overpower the movie.

“It was because it doesn’t always work out like you planned. You imagine it in your head, then you’re watching it, and you’re saying to yourself, ‘That’s not working. What can we do?’ Sometimes it can be saved in the edit, and sometimes it needs to be cut and reshot; That’s not even a first-time director issue. I had these conversations with James Wan while making the second Conjuring movie. It was to do with The Nun. The idea of that character came at a reshoot six months after we shot the rest of the movie, and that went on be the scariest thing in the movie and spawned a franchise. That showed me that even the best must do it and see if it works because you don’t know. Luckily I had great editors. They’d be like, ‘Does this work for you? Let’s try it with music. Let’s take the music out and see if that helps. Can we go further? If we had this shot, then we could do this or that.’ It’s almost like a musical, and you’re trying to get the right notes or phrasing.”

Wilson concluded, “It’d be much easier if this film were just a bunch of people talking (laughs). The reward for me is sitting in a theater and hearing people jump out of their seats and scream because I’m like, ‘I did that to you.’ I didn’t want this movie to be defined by a bunch of jump scares. That’s not for me. The horror movies that resonate with me are psychological, traumatic movies. I think of The Shining, Poltergeist, Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs, etc. and they are not known for major jump scares. I wanted those scenes in there as well, but I wanted it to be more than just that.”