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Insidious 2

Insidious 2

I leave it to Insidious 2 to faithfully expound upon the most significant fact about evil--those doing it aren't themselves, but rather are possessed by alters driving them to take sadistic pleasure in murdering innocents. It's quite something, after seeing the damage the adult Parker Crane has done to women he's culled from local denizens--rotted bodies aligned in church rows--to finally be introduced to him as a young boy, and for him to be attributed about the same amount of empathy as the good boy in the film, Josh Lambert. They spy him in long braids and a girl's dress, combing his doll's hair. When he turns around, he actually warns them to get out of the room--he actually tries to help them! Later we see his mother descend upon him and make him feel as if his entire known universe will be squashed out if he doesn't obey her in all respects, and cast himself in the role of female full-time so to be fully owned by her and bear no resemblance to a husband she wants cast out of memory altogether. Later he would own his mother's look--eyes of convinced sadism, a wide smile supped on other people's powerlessness and pain--and it's clear he's in no way his own self anymore: his mother alter has simply taken him over.


There is nothing scarier for human beings than the look of our mothers when they themselves are possessed. I've seen it--at an age where I was old enough to have the resources not to feel the normally life-saving need to bury my awareness of it. She wandered into my room while I was still awake, with the complete scary visage of someone under possession, driven to seek out innocents to harm. But while it was true that I was in her home at the time owing to vulnerability, I wasn't so vulnerable not to take some delight in this kind of "photo capture" of the source of the fear that had dissuaded me away from whatever full kind of self-realization I might have been capable of--"you, kid, are owned by me; I will flush into you my emotions, and they will have their full play with you." Here was the source of the absolutely terrifying "eye ball" nightmare I used to have all the time as the kid, where my dreams would be going casually along their route, and then all of a sudden a boulder-sized eyeball would appear and advance upon me. Here is the source of that maybe still subliminally felt sense, that if I'm out enjoying life, adorning myself with possessions and accomplishments beyond what my mother would have thought me allotted--something uncomfortable to her--that all of a sudden out of the blue I might casually open up a door and see a terror of teeth about to have it out with me.

Actually, this might be an exaggeration ... it is possible that now I'm completely demon free. What I do with my independence might take my mother--in all respects--further and further away from me (which, trust me, is pretty damn scary as well; and is surely the source of my conjuring her up in my daydreams and my writing), but it may be I can't see any Joker face, twisted to take delight in pain, and not instantly see the helpless "Parker Crane" that was going to have no choice but to let this demon into him/herself, and own them whole in response to triggers of self-fulfillment and helplessness.

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