Insidious: Why Killing Off Elise So Early Was a Mistake

Insidious director James Wan may not have realized it at the time, but killing off Elise Rainier in the first film was a bad move for the franchise. It’s not often that an actress finds their greatest fame as a senior citizen, but that’s exactly what happened to Lin Shaye, who in the last decade or so has become a fixture in horror films both big and small. That’s not to say that Shaye is a newcomer by any means, having been acting steadily in Hollywood for over 40 years at this point.

It might be tempting to give a lot of the credit for Shaye’s film career to her brother Bob, founder of New Line Cinema. In actuality though, Shaye was acting long before Shaye became powerful, and has appeared in many projects which her brother had nothing to do with. To horror fans, Shaye is a welcome presence onscreen who always seems to try and make the most of the smallest role, and excels at playing both kind and insane characters.

In Insidious, Shaye found her signature role in Elise Rainier, a kindly but powerful psychic who helps the Lambert family try and recover son Dalton from the clutches of a demon. They succeed, but it turns out father Josh has been possessed while in The Further, and strangles Elise when she starts to figure that out. Killing Elise may have seemed like a good shock moment at the time, but it ultimately proved to a mistake.

Insidious: Why Killing Off Elise So Early Was a Mistake

Granted, director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell might not have envisioned that Insidious would spawn a highly successful franchise, but considering their prior experiencing launching the Saw series, perhaps they should’ve. Elise quickly became a fan-favorite character in the first Insidious, but her death put up a barrier concerning how she could be used going forward. As a dead person, Elise can only appear physically in The Further – as she did in most of Insidious: Chapter 2 – or as a ghost invisible to most in the real world.

Once the decision was made to end the Lamberts’ story with Chapter 2, Wan and Whannell opted to focus the series on Elise, but due to the whole “being dead” thing, they were forced to craft prequel stories so that she could have all the dramatic freedom afforded to a living person again. Now that the time between Elise joining Specs and Tucker and the Lambert case has been filled in, it remains to be seen where the upcoming Insidious 5 will take the popular character. Will Insidious 5 become the first in the series to exclude Elise, or will a device be used to get around that, such as spending a bulk of the runtime in The Further? For now, it’s an open question, one that could’ve been averted by simply not killing her off in the first place.

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