It’s no easy feat fitting in with the world of James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Two men who have become masters at their genre have only ever relied on each other when it comes to getting the job done for their Insidious franchise, with Wan directing the first two entries, and Whannell writing all four installments and directing the third. That’s why when it came time to entrust another soul with the egregious task of living up to the guys who have redefined modern day horror, Wan and Whannell knew they really had to find a filmmaker who was up to par. Luckily, they found Adam Robitel, director of The Taking of Deborah Logan, and the rest is history.

I was fortunate enough to have a chat with Adam Robitel himself, director of the fourth entry in the series, Insidious: The Last Key. In the interview, we discuss the difficult task of trying to live up to the hype of James Wan, casting a mature actor as the face of a franchise, and feeling at home with the monsters.

Bloody Disgusting: One thing I think is cool about this movie is how we’re led to believe that Elise’s father is a monster, but by the end, we realize that he’s actually being controlled. Has there ever been any sort of monster in your life that you initially feared but then came to realize was actually okay?

Adam Robitel: That’s an interesting question. I’ll just say anecdotally, I struggle with this because yeah, when you see horrible things in the news, I think it’s human nature, to want to blame it on a demon. People say, you know, ‘Maybe there’s some metaphysical reason why a guy in Las Vegas just shot seventy people from a hotel window’ because at least that type of reasoning doesn’t hurt as much. So, we went back and forth, it was interesting with this movie to say things like, ‘Are we letting Gerald off the hook?’ in a way. I think his own pain at the end of the movie was punishment enough for his actions, but this idea of being a puppet. As far as a monster that I was fearful of in which I became unafraid, I mean, honestly, I’ve always loved monsters. To be honest, I mean being a genre geek, Pennywise was always so cool to me. I never actually saw it as evil, I always saw it as ‘The Other’ and I relate to ‘The Other’ on an implicit level, so there was no separation between me and monsters. There was always a kinship, so whether it be Clive Barker, or whomever. So, I’m a weird one in that sense, I always sort of related to monsters.

BD: In the movie industry in general, but especially in horror, we usually see this extremely youthful casting, that only seems to aim for younger and younger actors as time goes on. I think it’s really cool to not only have a woman as the star of this franchise, but somebody who’s a bit more mature. It feels much more relatable.

AR: My first film, The Taking of Deborah Logan had a wonderful actress by the name of Jill Larson, and I was really close to my grandmother and I feel like, like you said, there’s a dearth of great roles for older actresses and I feel like it’s a real shame because they’re the matriarchs of our society and Lin’s character, I’ve known Lin a long time and I’m a personal friend of Lin’s and I have to tell you, she’s so grateful, and lives with such gratitude about this renaissance that she’s been having and she went to Hell and back, I mean she literally gave 100% of herself and how fantastic to have a franchise like you said that is wrapped around her, she’s such an underdog. I told James Wan, in chapter one, I saw an early screening of it at LA Film School and Lin Shaye’s monologue about The Further and about astral projection and rules of the world, if she didn’t nail that the way that she did, I’m convinced the movie wouldn’t have worked because she had to have such supremely dexterous ownership of the material and make it real, and her making it real makes it real for all of us, and our suspension of disbelief is directly related to how good she is in the movies, and so she’s earned it. Chapter 4 is so much of an origin story for her character, and I always thought if you’re going to do four or five movies, there has to be a reason for them to exist. And this one is a really good one. It’s about abuse, it’s about a little girl who has this gift, and is not accepted by her father. So, those are great, compelling reasons to have a movie.

BD: Yeah and I think maybe having a character who is more mature is a little bit more relatable for some of us.

AR: Absolutely. I mean, look, there’s nothing wrong with attractive actors in a movie, but when it’s just like, ‘Oh that’s just the way in’ and ‘Puerile teens drinking and smoking’, there’s a place for that, but I don’t relate to it. If I’m watching a documentary, I want to see real people. If I’m watching a horror film, I want people I can invest in, and that goes back to part one, people like Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson, these are just two normal people. And look, this isn’t new, I mean it’s taking its cues from Poltergeist and other movies that came before, but you want grounded people who feel real and then you put them in an unreal situation and it’s just much scarier because of that.

BD: It’s a huge honor that they would choose you to direct this movie because I mean, James Wan and Leigh Whannell are the only people who have ever directed an Insidious movie until now, so how did they approach you? What do you recall from that experience?

AR: It was a huge honor, it was incredibly daunting and I felt like I was stepping into the shadows of like Michael Jordan. I mean Leigh and Wan are like the modern day supernatural masters, and I did not take that lightly. I had known James personally through Lin, like we’d go out to dinners at Lin’s house, so he was very gracious when I was trying to get my first film made and then he was just lovely in the press after he’d seen it, and he supported it, so I’ve had such a, for whatever reason, he’s just been so amazing to me and a very lovely person just about saying, you know, ‘Stick with it’ and so when Leigh decided he wasn’t going to direct it, my name was put on a shortlist at Blumhouse. Now, I had only made a found footage movie and if you watch a good found footage movie, people think, ‘Oh it’s just spontaneous and they just run around with cameras’. Well actually, the opposite is true, everything is choreographed and everything is designed, but I had to prove to Jason Blum that I could put together a traditional three-point coverage kind of movie, so I went in really heavy, I did a look book and I did a bunch of animated storyboards and really showed them what the movie could be, and the earlier draft that Leigh had did not have a demon in it, and I said, ‘Guys, to be honest, when I think of Insidious I think about Lipstick Demon and the iconography of the franchise. You guys need a demon that is kind of evocative of prison and locks and keys’. So, out of those first couple of meetings I got the job and then we ended up coming up with Key Face.

BD: I mean, coming in on the fourth installment, you have a big weight on your shoulders. It must be difficult finding the balance between your vision and what Wan and Whannell have already established in the franchise.

AR: It was hard. I mean at first, I was always saying to myself, ‘What would James Wan do?’ and that’s an easy trap to fall into. I cannot out-Wan the Wan. He’s so good at what he does, and so that was kind of a liberating point for me, I think it was like a weekend of shooting, I was like, ‘You know what? Let me not try to do what James is going to do’ because it’s natural, right? It’s like he’s so good and then I kind of leaned into the material, and I said, ‘Okay, what would Robitel do? What is this material really about?’ and again, I’m more frightened of what my abusive father could do to me than I am of a demon that comes out from underneath the bed, and that’s the reason we have horror, is to create a safe way for us to experience catharsis about the shit that really bothers us. So leaning into that was very liberating. I mean look, doing scares and how to create tension, like there’s a very definitive way to do that, but it starts with characters that you care about. Like little Ava, she’s so good in this movie and her performance is so good, and again, something that James often talked about and Leigh talked about is that you’re only as scared as the people you’re watching. The scariest part of The Conjuring is literally the little girl staring off into the corner and pointing. We don’t see what she sees, but we’re as terrified as she is, so if you can do that, that’s your special effects. All of the cats jumping out of cabinets and big loud sounds doesn’t compete with performance.

BD: You may say that you can’t out-Wan the Wan, but what is the definitive way to scare someone? Because I’m a big horror nerd and I know so many die-hard horror fans who watched The Taking of Deborah Logan and were like, ‘This is really scary. This is legit’, and even in the new Insidious, there are some really great scares in there, so how do you properly frame a scare?

AR: With The Taking I always felt like, what scared me was medical stuff, our own mortality, I think Alzheimer’s is really terrifying to me, what was exciting in that movie was to just start with something really grounded and then slowly start to take the wheels off. I think found footage has a bad rep but if it’s done right, you really kind of buy into it being real. With Insidious, so much of it was again, really being invested in the characters, and look, I learned a lot on this movie, because there were times, you always want as much coverage as you can get and so like for example, little Elise, we know that there’s a guy who just got fried at the prison, and little Elise is talking to her brother and then he says something weird, she opens her curtains and realizes that her brother’s actually sitting across the room from her, that’s not her brother who she was talking to, so that builds the tension, and so there’s so much about creating that first pre-charge, and then it just becomes about the traditional camera work, don’t show them everything, stay behind her, build the tension, she gets up, she pats down the blanket and there’s nothing there, the audience breathes, they thought they were gonna get the scare but they didn’t so they deflate for a second, then she turns around to her brother and then you do the sting. So, so much of it is timing and so much is context, and then sound more than anything. But none of that works if you don’t care about who you’re watching.

BD: I thought it was interesting too, to have Elise’s niece turn out to have the gift as well. Like, was that you doing that or was that Leigh’s idea?

AR: It was Leigh wanting to do that. I think maybe it’s genetic and it opens doors to potential other storylines and it was a neat way to connect the two of them, having been away for so long and having abandoned Christian this was a good sort of gut punch. Like hey, I’m just like you. Where it goes, that’s up to Leigh.

BD: I’ve been wondering if in the future Imogen is going to turn out to be the frontrunner of the franchise.

AR: Maybe! Although death is not necessarily the end in Insidious movies, so even though Elise is gone, or will be gone, maybe it’s not the last time you see her, either.

Insidious: The Last Key is in now theaters everywhere.