The ads for the sixth installment of Sony’s cash-cow horror franchise Insidious: Out of the Further try to compare it to the enormous success earlier this year of innovative genre entries Obsession and Backrooms by noting it comes from the same producers (these include Blumhouse, James Wanm etc.). So feel free to think this is something hip and new, not just the latest in a string of films that started in 2010 and has made three-quarters of a billion dollars at the box office.
In another effort to make us believe this is all fresh and original, the signature family ties to Insidious and most of the sequels has been reworked. The Lamberts (played in the films notably by Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) are just explained away by series regular Elise Rainer (Lin Shaye) in a couple of lines as she says that even though they may have conquered the “Red Door,” it always will open up to new terror, no matter what you do. So as Elise — who you will recall was killed off in the first edition but has returned as a ghostly presence and guide in each subsequent film — befriends our new family, we also get a twist here that threatens to turn this all into a zombie version of what worked before.
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The title Out of the Further explains it all because our new protagonist, Gemma (Amelia Eve), is a dental hygienist who finds she has a unique talent to be able to enter the Further and bring the dead back from their eternal purgatory. The opening sequence, set in 1999, sets up Gemma’s past as the young daughter whose mother has been lost to the Further, but not before Gemma unknowingly inherits the curse — or gift — of being able to enter this world as we cut to 20 years later.
She now is working in a dental practice, has her own daughter Kaya (Island Austin) and a loving cop boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea), and everything seems normal, until it isn’t. Strange sightings in town of a trio of people who look like they just came off the set of The Walking Dead indicate what is to come. A very bad experience she has at the office while trying to clean some weird old geezer’s rotting teeth also tells us trouble lies ahead. In no time, Gemma is thrust into harrowing dreams, spiritually sending her actually into the Further, first via a claustrophobic trip through the “Pillow Fort,” an endless narrow maze she navigates as the various dead characters pop up to terrorize her before she can get back to the living.
This sequence is the closest the film gets to the wickedly fun inventions of Backrooms before it returns to the more familiar tropes of the well-worn horror genre. What is happening to her? Well, this is all explained in a lot of exposition laid out by new director-writer Jacob Chase, who brings in all-knowing and kindly Elise from the beyond to connect with a savvy and take-no-prisoners medium/tattoo artist (yes!) named Clare (Maisie Richardson-Sellers). She bridges the two worlds that will use Gemma’s talents to thwart a plan by evil (and dead) villain Cyrus (Sam Spruell, doing his best Ozzy Osbourne), who desperately wants to come back to life and bring all his deceased friends with him to continue the carnage he started when he was alive. Using tattoos and grapefruits (!) as a roadmap, Clare lays out a complicated plan for Gemma to enter the Further and foil Cyrus’ wicked plans, with the help of Nick, before it is too late.
This dog-days-of-August PG-13 exercise is careful never to get too graphic, but it does manage to make us cringe during the dental appointments, which still can’t match what Olivier did to Hoffman in Marathon Man for sheer terror, but, with imposing drills, ought to feel inventive enough for younger audiences drawn to this new edition. Despite the return of fan favorites like KeyFace, Doll Girl, Lipstick and other demons, along with a slew of others, it still feels a bit stale compared to the New Wave of cinematic horror ushered in by Obsession, Backrooms, Weapons, Barbarian and Sinners — all of which make endless iterations of the same old/same old like Out of the Further feel instantly forgettable. The success of the aforementioned movies indicates, if nothing else, that audiences are craving something fresh and different. Insidious: Out of the Further might just as well be titled Insidious: Out of the Same Playbook.
Producers are Jason Blum, Leigh Whannell, James Wan and Oren Peli.
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Title: Insidious: Out of the Further
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Release Date: August 21, 2026
Director-screenwriter: Jacob Chase
Cast: Amelia Eve, Lin Shaye, Brandon Perea, Sam Spruell, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Island Austin
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hr 46 mins
