Patrick Wilson: The Scream King Takes the Director’s Chair

When Patrick Wilson was first approached about reprising the role of Josh Lambert — the patriarch of a family terrorised by ghouls in James Wan’s haunted-house chiller, Insidious (2010) — he was unenthusiastic.

“Another sequel? I thought, ‘Oh boy, what new ground is there to even cover?’ I’m good. I’ve got my other horror franchise,” Wilson said.

The “other” franchise refers to The Conjuring, also conceived by Wan, which began as a 2013 paranormal horror tale that led to a separate universe of sequels and prequels in which Wilson plays one half of a team of married demonologists. Between The Conjuring and the first two Insidious movies, Wilson has established himself as a bona fide scream king. Still, he’s a classically trained actor who has starred in big-budget superhero movies (Watchmen, Aquaman), indie dramas (Little Children) and musical theater productions (Oklahoma!). The prospect of a new Insidious didn’t seem all that exciting.

Then, Wilson was asked if he’d consider directing it, too. That got his attention.

“I’d been trying to direct a movie since 2015,” Wilson said over coffee at a New York bistro. “TV didn’t appeal to me. And I’m not the kind of guy who wants to make a tiny indie that nobody sees just to prove that I can do it. I want my movie to play well in theaters, so to have this half-a-billion-dollar franchise supported by a studio come my way — that’s rare for a first-time director.”

Insidious: The Red Door, the fifth movie to fly under the Insidious banner, wisely skips over the lackluster third and fourth installments and returns to the events of Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013). After nearly ax-murdering his entire family, Jack Torrance-style, Josh retakes control of his body from a psycho-biddy demon, and — with the help of a mind-scrubbing hypnotist — represses all memory of his possession. The Lamberts are free and the credits roll.

“No offense, but that’s not how you deal with a problem,” Wilson chuckled.

The Red Door confronts the trauma of that earlier film from the perspective of a father-son relationship. Ten years later, Josh has separated from his wife, Renai (Rose Byrne), and is the quintessential absent dad, haunted by a past he can’t articulate. In Insidious, it’s revealed that the couple’s eldest child, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), has inherited his father’s ability to astral project, which renders him vulnerable to the ghosts hanging out in a netherworld called the Further. Dalton, too, had his memory erased. Now, the prickly teenager rejects his father, although he’s stuck with him on the drive to his first year of art school.

I asked Wilson if his sons — one is heading to college soon — send him curt one-word texts. “Nah, we have a great relationship,” said Wilson, who since 2005 has been married to actress Dagmara Dominczyk (Karolina in Succession).

Wilson accepted the offer to direct The Red Door under the condition that it would “make sense with my life.” In practical terms, this meant shooting near his home in Montclair, New Jersey. (“It was almost like a regular job, coming back to the family after work,” he said.) But he was also keen for his debut to reflect him as a person.

The film marks a return to form for the “Insidious” franchise, recapturing the original’s pretentiousless thrills and fun-house charms, approaching the Lamberts’ grim history with the silliness and sincerity of throwback horror from the ’80s or ’90s.

Wilson wasn’t an especially big fan of the genre when he first signed on to Insidious. He considers himself a generalist. “I grew up with Indiana Jones and Star Wars,” said Wilson, who just turned 50, adding that his taste in film was shaped by outings to the multiplexes around Tampa Bay, Florida, where he was raised with his two older brothers.

“I was into horror movies that transcended genre — Salem’s Lot, Jaws.” His eyes widened: “Poltergeist. I remember when I was a kid, our house was robbed. Absolutely no connection to the Poltergeist, but the way my brain processed that event, the terror I felt when we got home and realized our house had been invaded, my memory embedded the two things together.”

For The Red Door, Wilson knew he wanted Dalton to be an artist, invoking the horror archetype of the gloomy kid drawing morbid images in crayon — only Dalton, at 18, has decided to make a career out of it. “Going to any kind of arts school is spiritually taxing,” Wilson said, recalling his years in Carnegie Mellon University’s acting conservatory. Under the tutelage of a demanding professor (Hiam Abbass from Succession), Dalton is encouraged to dig into his inner life to fuel his work, which teases the Further’s fiends out of hiding.

Set primarily on a college campus, the film also pokes fun at the fragility of men who try incredibly hard to seem, well, masculine — like the toxic fraternity brothers floating in Dalton’s orbit. Wilson’s own statuesque appearance — I told him I still think of him as the “prom king,” the name given to him by the lusty neighbourhood mothers in Little Children — might seem to group him with this lot. With The Red Door, Wilson made a point to engage with the cultural conversation about masculinity. Being a father to two sons means he’s constantly thinking about what it means to promote a healthy identity for young men.

Wilson perked up when we asked him about his love of rock music, another personal touch he weaves into his directing debut. Listen closely and you’ll hear him singing over the end credits to the heavy metal stylings of the Swedish band Ghost. Wilson seemed giddy to join the small ranks of directors who sing songs in their own movies. He cited John Carpenter and Big Trouble in Little China as an inspiration.

When Mike Nichols cast him in Angels in America, Wilson said the director talked to him about Paul Newman’s career. “Being a movie star is hard, he said. You go where it takes you. To enjoy doing one of the opportunities given to you — that’s a privilege.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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