Lin Shaye read the new Insidious script at two in the morning, in bed, and it scared her badly enough that she got out from under the covers and took the pages downstairs.
I took it and locked it in a closet downstairs.
She says in new promo material for the film.
Shaye has been playing Elise Rainier since 2010 and has read five of these scripts. This is the one that sent her out of the bedroom.
The reel arrives ahead of the film’s August 21 opening, alongside comments from franchise architect James Wan, producing here rather than directing. Wan says the sixth entry:
reminded me of what I did on the first film.
Which is a pointed thing to say about a movie somebody else made, and he calls the process a real joy for the new scares it let him build.
A new director pulling from his own fears
Jacob Chase (Come Play) writes and directs, working from a story developed with David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick. He is blunt about where the material came from:
I was using my own absolutely terrifying fears in the film.
Directors say versions of that constantly. It lands differently on this franchise, because the first Insidious ran on exactly that fuel (Leigh Whannell writing his own anxieties into a red-faced thing at the end of a hallway), and because this is the second straight entry without Whannell on script duty. Chase is doing what Whannell originally did.
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The premise flips the formula
Amelia Eve stars as Gemma, a young mother raising her daughter in her childhood home, who discovers she can travel into The Further. Then the actual hook lands: she not only travels into The Further, but can bring things back. Once the demons work out what she can do, our side of the veil becomes the playground.
Five movies have run on the same engine. Somebody astral projects, something follows them home, Elise sorts it out. Out of the Further makes the leak the whole premise instead of the third-act problem, and if Chase commits to it, that is a genuinely different film from The Red Door.
What else we know
Brandon Perea, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Sam Spruell and Laura Gordon fill out the cast. Joseph Bishara returns to score, which matters more than it sounds; his sound design is half the reason the first two films land. Jason Blum, Oren Peli, Wan and Whannell produce for Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, with Screen Gems and Stage 6 under Sony.
The franchise has pulled over $740 million worldwide across five films, so a sixth was always coming. Whether it earns the “closet story” is a Friday problem.
Insidious: Out of the Further opens in theatres August 21, 2026.