10 Horror Movies To Watch If You Loved Insidious

After director James Wan kickstarted one of the most profitable and well-known horror franchises of the modern era with his groundbreaking low-budget movie Saw, but before he began one of the others with The Conjuring, he started a third series with the equally-popular supernatural chiller Insidious.

If you’re a fan of the movie and want to see something similar in the genre, any of these 10 horror movies should quench your thirst for a creepy atmosphere and ghostly scares.

10 Sinister

Scott Derrickson’s supernatural horror movie follows a writer who, after moving with his young family into a new house, discovers a box of 8mm home movies in the attic. Upon inspection, each one appears to be from a different home and depicts the gruesome murders of each house’s family, with an eerie figure connecting all of them.

Sinister, much like Insidious, is all about inducing dread by any means necessary, leading to all kinds of horrific frights and jumps throughout the movie.

9 Ouija: Origin of Evil

One of the most surprising horror hits of recent years, Mike Flanagan’s prequel to the almost-completely forgotten 2014 Hasbro produced horror movie Ouija demonstrates the director’s Stanislavskian approach to maximum effort no matter what the project.

Set in the 1960s and focussing on the family drama of a widow and her two young daughters experiencing increased freedoms as women due to their circumstances, Origin of Evil not only improves greatly upon its predecessor but actually enriches the story of that movie too.

8 The Ritual

Released on Netflix in 2017, The Ritual was the feature-length debut of director David Bruckner, who had made a name for himself with horror movie fans with a number of highly-memorable segments in anthology movies over the course of the preceding decade.

Demonstrating a lot of the same visual ingenuity that James Wan injected into Insidious, this story follows a group of friends who become lost in a Swedish forest and begin to feel a malevolent presence haunting their dreams and stalking them through the trees.

7 Before I Wake

Another Netflix movie, also directed by the prolific Mike Flanagan but produced and released before Ouija: Origin of Evil despite being eventually released several years after it, Before I Wake revolves around a young boy whose dreams and nightmares manifest into reality as he sleeps.

Fans of Insidious‘ astral plane of “The Further” will no doubt enjoy this creative chiller for its otherworldly designs and emotional performances.

6 The Woman in Black

Daniel Radcliffe leads this classic haunted house fright-fest adapted from Susan Hill’s novel of the same name and Insidious fans will surely notice the shared influence of the ghostly imagery.

Radcliffe plays a young lawyer sent to a decaying gothic mansion to put affairs in order for its sale but quickly finds the local townspeople fear the secluded house for good reason.

5 The Others

Another very classically influenced ghost story, The Others was written, directed, and scored by Alejandro Amenábar and received significant critical acclaim and box office success for a horror movie back in 2001.

Set in the usual type of isolated old English estate, the plot follows Nicole Kidman’s single mother as she begins to suspect that the house is occupied by more than just her family and the servants.

4 Crimson Peak

An even more opulent take on the archetypal English ghost story than even The Woman in Black or The Others, Guillermo del Toro directs this sumptuous and sweeping gothic drama set mostly at the titular manor.

Filled with the director’s unceasing eye for detail and macabre designs, Crimson Peak features a star-studded cast with a standout performance from Jessica Chastain.

3 Mama

Jessica Chastain again steals the show in this oddly ethereal supernatural horror movie as she plays a woman forced into a maternal role she had never seen for herself after the discovery of her boyfriend’s nieces, who had been presumed dead and were found living ferally in an abandoned house in the woods.

Adapted by director Andy Muschietti from his short film of the same name, and executive produced by Guillermo del Toro, Mama slips more gracefully between drama and horror than most movies of its kind as familial bonds begin to form between the characters in the shadow of the children’s imaginary guardian figure, who intrudes into their lives and reveals themselves as not so imaginary after all.

2 Poltergeist (2015)

A remake of the 1982 Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg classic of the same name, Poltergeist shares a number of plot similarities to Insidious, no doubt as the original movie was one of the biggest influences on the supernatural horror movie subgenre.

The Poltergeist franchise in general shares the Insidious franchise’s affinity for fighting back against the paranormal with force and the results are equal parts fun and frightening.

1 It

Andy Muschietti brought the horror genre to a wider audience than has been seen for quite some time with his massively popular first chapter in his adaptation of Stephen King’s iconically complicated novel of the same name.

The movie follows a group of small-town Kids on Bikes as they become menaced by an otherwordly evil that typically manifests itself into the form of a man-eating clown called Pennywise. An Insidious fan is sure to love every twist, turn, and drop on this ghoulish rollercoaster experience.

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