Watch Insidious 2 Online James Wan, the director of such other films as The Conjuring, Saw and Dead Silence has gotten the horror genre down to a finely-tuned science by this point. In Insidious: Chapter 2, he has certainly struck oil again, succeeding on nearly every level and even raising the bar on the previous Insidious film.

This sequel picks up directly where the previous title left off, giving fanatic audiences another chance to enter into “The Further” – a trans-dimensional portal to a shockingly surreal realm of uncertainty. Patrick Wilson, plays a father who shares a deep spiritual — and perhaps dark — connection to his son, who attracts dark spirits.

One of the film’s greatest flaws is that it at times, feels like previously-treaded territory. Not just in the previous film, but in every horror movie ever made. Personally, the reliance upon small children in the horror genre is one of my least favourite tropes and it is heavily relied upon in the sequel as well.

That being said, the film itself is altogether more grounded and believable, which makes for even more horrifying and thrilling situations. In fact, the scares the movie delivers are more organic as well, not relying on the same ‘pop-ups’ that many directors so cheaply employ. This time around, the terror comes from the creepy and unsettling atmosphere, which is a very good thing.

Insidious: Chapter 2 picks up right where chapter 1 ended, with Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne) discovering the corpse of murdered medium Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), with her husband Josh Lambert seemingly the culprit. After a police investigation fails to connect the fingerprints that strangled Elise to Josh, the Lamberts are set free to return to life as normal – only normality never comes, as more supernatural occurrences begin to plague Renai and her once-comatose son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), with Josh oblivious to it all in his militant insistence that the family get back to normal.

Meanwhile, Elise’s former assistants Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) recruit a veteran medium named Carl (Steve Coulter) to help contact their former mentor and solve the case of who murdered her. However, as the team digs into Elise’s death, they quickly find connections to Josh Lambert and the entities haunting him, getting closer to a dark truth that spans time and space, life and death.

James Wan is, by now, an established name in the horror genre, and he’s enjoyed recent horror movie success thanks to his summer hit The Conjuring. However, Insidious was a much more divisive movie in terms of fan reception, and that stigma – combined with high expectations based on Wan’s other 2013 horror entry – are likely going to challenge Insidious: Chapter 2 in regards to viewer satisfaction. Harder still will be the adjustment as viewers realize that Wan has less interest and re-heating old Insidious ghost-story leftovers, and instead uses the sequel to truly expanded the mythos of his characters and world, ultimately creating something that is more akin to The Shining.

While Chapter 2 does include a few effectively creepy signature Wan scare sequences, the majority of the film is dedicated to laying out a two-handed narrative (once again co-written by Wan and Whannell). On the one hand we get a Shining-style psychological thriller centered on the Lambert household; on the other hand, a supernatural horror-mystery revolving around Elise’s team and their investigation into the history of the ghostly old woman who killed Elise.

Whether or not those two plot threads appease fan expectations, Wan and Whannell do an effective job of using the first film to create an intriguing and tense (if not scary) second chapter, which does what so many other “Chapter 2? pieces fail to: expand upon a self-contained story in an intriguing and smart way, making creative and logical use of all the various elements of the first film while tweaking and evolving those ideas in new ways. Taken altogether, Insidious parts 1&2 form a complete unbroken story whose various threads weave together into a logical and cohesive whole – one that even offers a few twists, and juggles powder keg plot devices like time-travel with a clarity and focus that is impressive. Just seeing the whole saga come together is worth a theater ticket price – a rarity in horror movie storytelling.