Insidious: Out of the Further Filmmaker Jacob Chase on Putting Character First

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SPOILER WARNING: This article and interview contain major spoilers for Insidious: Out of the Further.

For writer-director Jacob Chase, the horror at the center of Insidious: Out of the Further was always connected to something much more personal.

Chase was becoming a father for the first time while writing the film, and some of his own fears about parenthood found their way into Gemma’s story. At the center of the film are three generations of women and a mother desperately trying to prevent her own painful history from reaching her daughter.

“I was fairly terrified of being a dad,” Chase says. “I definitely filtered that into my writing of this.”

Building from David Leslie Johnson’s original script, Chase became interested in the idea of someone trying so hard to escape her past that she begins repeating parts of it. In trying to give Maya a different childhood from her own, Gemma starts slipping into some of the same behaviors she once feared in her mother.

“What I wanted to do was make this about somebody who is desperately trying to run from their past, trying to sort of correct the sins of their own mother.”

That emotional arc also influenced how Chase decided whose perspective audiences would experience throughout the film. Early on, the camera stays closely aligned with Gemma as her reality begins to unravel. Eventually, the film starts pulling away from her and toward Maya, allowing audiences to see how frightening Gemma’s behavior looks from her daughter’s perspective.

“All of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh, this is what she really feels like, and this is how scary she’s appearing to somebody else.’”

For Chase, that character-first approach extends into the scares themselves.

He traces his fascination with creating scares back to building haunted attractions when he was younger, where he learned that anticipation can be more effective than the scare waiting at the end.

“The buildup is almost more important than the sort of ‘jump scare.’”

That meant avoiding scares that existed solely to startle the audience. Each major scare needed to reveal something, change Gemma’s understanding of what was happening, or push the story in a new direction.

At the same time, Chase knew audiences familiar with horror could recognize many of the usual tricks. Silence, heavy breathing or a lingering shot can immediately signal that something is coming, so he looked for opportunities to disrupt those expectations.

“I was trying to constantly zig when they were expecting me to zag.”

That attention extends to the framing of individual shots. Chase storyboards as much of his films as possible, working with his cinematographer and storyboard artists to establish a visual language before arriving on set. That preparation also gives him the freedom to recognize when an unexpected idea might work better.

One of his favorite examples came from a shot where Lester can be spotted standing deep in the background. The moment wasn’t originally planned that way, but Chase saw the opportunity while filming and repositioned the character.

“It’s one of my favorite moments to watch with an audience now because it’s like half the audience gasps and the other half is like, ‘What? What did you see?’”

The film’s pillow fort sequence required considerably more planning.

Chase and his team built models with foam board and miniature figures to map out the tunnels before realizing the full design would be far too large to construct. Instead, they found ways to repeat sections and disguise the repetition, creating the feeling of an impossibly large space while keeping most of the sequence practical.

“With the exception of one shot in that sequence, it’s all actually like, you know, everything’s covered up. We’re all claustrophobic in there together making this crazy sequence.”

That combination of careful planning and experimentation is part of what Chase still enjoys most about filmmaking. Even on a production of this scale, he tries to hold onto the feeling of making short films with friends when he was younger.

“When I’m in a scene, it absolutely feels like the same joy as I felt when I was just with a bunch of friends and I had my little mini TV camera making short films.”

That experimentation became particularly useful in finding new ways to enter and leave the Further. Chase wanted to avoid simply recreating transitions audiences had already seen elsewhere in the franchise, while still using a visual language they could intuitively understand.

When Gemma first enters the Further, that sometimes means deliberately disorienting the audience because she has no understanding of where she is either.

“It’s really just coming from a character perspective.”

That philosophy becomes even more important in the final act, when Maya is revealed to be able to enter the Further herself. Chase deliberately kept her away from much of the escalating danger so audiences might assume she was safe before bringing her directly into the center of it.

From there, the horror increasingly connects back to the film’s larger story about what gets passed from one generation to the next.

Gemma eventually discovers that moments from her childhood she understood as threatening were actually attempts by her mother to protect her. For Chase, the supernatural mechanics of the climax only worked if letting go of the house also represented Gemma letting go of the history that had shaped her.

“Horror is all in service of character.”

The image Chase considers the most important in the film isn’t one of its demons or scares. It’s Gemma standing at the door as the image of her younger self disappears, finally allowing her to see her mother, her childhood and herself differently.

“Every part of writing this was about building up to that moment.”

Even the film’s final image was in Chase’s mind early in the process. The overlapping handprints of three generations of women acknowledge that Gemma, Maya and the women who came before them will always be connected, without suggesting that their history has to determine what comes next.

“These intertwined lives that we can never fully escape from, but that we can grow from and let go what we need to let go.”

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