Jacob Chase is trying to do something rare with insidious 5: make a sixth movie feel like a reset. Insidious: Out of the Further opened in theaters Friday via Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Chase said the pitch was built around avoiding the usual sequel gravity that long-running horror series can carry.
Chase on five movies
“Obviously I am a big ‘Insidious’ fan,” Chase said, but he also argued the franchise had already covered a lot of ground. “There’s also been five movies, and that’s a lot, and it’s too many. Anyone in the audience is going to ask, ‘Why are we still making these movies? This is too many ‘Insidious’ movies, right?’ So my big pitch coming into it was, ‘This cannot feel like just another ‘Insidious’ movie. This has to feel like it’s a fresh start.’ It’s an original film that happens to have ‘Insidious’ in the title was my goal.”
That framing gives the release a clearer business purpose than a standard franchise extension. Instead of asking audiences to treat it like another chapter with the same rhythms, Chase is selling a cleaner entry point for people who may have checked out after the earlier installments. For a series now at its sixth movie, that is the difference between maintenance and repositioning.
Gemma in The Further
Gemma, played by Amelia Eve, still fits the franchise’s core mechanism: she can astral project and bring demons from The Further into the real world. She is also processing trauma passed down from her mother, played by Laura Gordon, while protecting her daughter, played by Island Austin. Chase kept the familiar supernatural setup in place, but he centered the story on a character problem that can carry a reset rather than just repeat an old pattern.
That approach lines up with the way he described the scares. “What I tried to do was to make sure every single time there was a scare moment in the movie, that it had real stakes, that it really, it fundamentally changed the story in some way,” he said. For a soft reboot, that is the useful discipline: scare the audience, but also move the movie forward every time the pressure spikes.
Bigworm Sherwood Scare in Northridge
Chase said he learned how to scare people by building Bigworm Sherwood Scare in Northridge by hand and operating the 1,800-foot maze for two years. The attraction ran from 2012 to 2014, and the proceeds went to cystic fibrosis research and aid. He compared the scale of it to “creating a full-on Disney immersive experience kind of thing,” a practical training ground that seems closer to this film’s reset mindset than any studio memo could be.
That background matters because it explains why Chase is treating the horror beats like engineered encounters rather than random shocks. He watched rehearsals on cameras or followed guests to see where moments landed, then carried that feedback loop into Come Play in 2020 and now into Insidious: Out of the Further. The result is a franchise entry built to work for Fans of the Insidious who want the familiar machinery, but also for viewers who need a reason to believe the series can still begin again.
Out of the Further reset
The cleanest read on Chase’s approach is that he is not trying to outdo the earlier films on volume alone. He is trying to make the sixth movie feel usable again. If the reset works, the value is not just in one weekend in theaters; it is in whether Insidious: Out of the Further can reopen a series that had started to feel used up.
