After a decade away from the big screen, the Lambert family is finally back. With the new 2023 horror movie Insidious: The Red Door, we pick up with Josh and Renai Lambert and their kids, and see how their lives have changed in the years since the last film.
How does Insidious: The Red Door end? Does Josh remember the time he was possessed? Now that he’s a teenager, will Dalton’s strange paintings awaken dormant memories of The Further and the Lipstick-Face Demon? Find out below!
Warning: there are spoilers for Insidious: The Red Door in this article.
When The Red Door starts, Josh and Renai are divorced, and Josh is estranged from his kids, especially from Dalton, his eldest son. Dalton inherited Josh’s ability to astral project, and both he and Josh had their memories suppressed following the events of the first two films. As a result, they’re estranged from one another and don’t totally understand why.
Dalton is headed off to college, and when he arrives, he triggers his ability to astral project and begins drawing and then painting a red door. While at college, he meets Chris, who helps him open up and eventually gets wrapped up in his search to understand the painting he’s drawn.
Josh, meanwhile, is attempting to get to the bottom of his memory problems, and being haunted by spirits that are attacking him from the astral plane. Eventually, Dalton realizes that in order to make the hauntings stop, he needs to close the door he’s drawn for good, and lock the demons in the astral plane for good.
Dalton gets possessed by a demon
After projecting several times, Dalton is possessed by a demon and sees a vision of his father attempting to kill him and his brother from Insidious: Chapter 2. Josh goes to Renai after discovering that his father, who he’d never met and was estranged from, was actually an astral projector just like him, and ultimately died by suicide because of the torment he experienced. Renai reveals that this has all happened before, and Josh and Dalton have both had their memories suppressed. She divorced him because the children were scared of him, remembering that he had tried to kill them and not understanding that he was possessed at the time.
Josh then astral projects in order to save Dalton, and ultimately manages to break the possession over him. The two of them then attempt to escape the astral plane and lock the demons there behind the red door. Josh ultimately decides to sacrifice himself, realizing that he can end this whole cycle if he stays to keep the door closed.
How does Insidious: The Red Door end?
After Dalton leaves Josh behind and returns to his body, though, he’s able to paint the door shut via the painting that started this whole thing off. He decides to keep the painting, recognizing that destroying it and attempting to forget would ultimately do no good. Josh and Dalton both move forward with the full knowledge of everything that has happened to them, and Dalton draws a new painting of him and his dad when his dad rescued him in the first movie. The cycle of hauntings may finally be over.
Insidious: The Red Door ends with Dalton receiving a visit from Elise Rainier, the psychic from the first two films, who tells him that he has a promising future ahead of him, suggesting his time astral projecting may not be over.
Insidious: The Red Door is now playing in theaters.
