Lin Shaye reveals the timeline, plot details of Insidious: Chapter 4

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 4 has already wrapped principal photography, but we won't get a chance to scope it out until next year. Fortunately, we have Daily Dead, who spoke with franchise star Lin Shaye about the project. Shaye was quite open, revealing aspects of Leigh Whannell's script that we certainly haven't heard before:

[The film] goes back to Elise’s beginnings. And you also meet Elise at a very different point in her life. It takes place right after the end of Chapter 3, when she walks off with Specs and Tucker and they’re starting their company, Spectral Sightings, and they are now living at her home. They’re like her two sons, her two bad sons.

So it starts out in a very jovial, happy place and then goes downhill from there. And downhill meaning uphill, though. It’s a fantastic story and it took me back into what made Elise who she is. You meet my family, my mother, my father—we go back to my hometown, which is in New Mexico. And so that’s where this takes place and her quest to find the bad guy that’s been haunting her. It’s a really wonderful story. I think the fans will really, really enjoy it. And it’s scary on levels they’re not going to expect.

So this entry is going to be a "midquel," I guess you'd call it, linking the prequel INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 3 with the events of the first two films. Like the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY or SAW films, this franchise is developing a truly intricate timeline that will reward obsessive fans upon rewatching. I can't say that's the bad thing, although the average quality of the INSIDIOUS films is probably a bit higher than one or both of those series.

Leigh Whannell, and Angus Sampson are also returning to the cast, joined by Kirk Acevedo, Bruce Davison, Spencer Locke, and Caitlin Gerard.

Produced by Jason Blum, Oren Peli, and James Wan, INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 4 is set to haunt theaters on October 20, 2017.