I watched the new Insidious over the weekend. The movie is about a man whose body becomes infested with the soul of killer who had killed himself long ago. It appears, based upon the worldview of the Insidious franchise, that there are malevolent spirits roaming the nether world waiting for a chance to exploit our human world for their own selfish existence. I munched on some popcorn and watched the inhabited body do the dead soul’s bidding.
It wasn’t too scary of a movie. At least it wasn’t scary until I started thinking that, while addiction is a disease, could it also be an undead spirit awaiting entry into someone’s body for its own selfish gain? I gave it some thought and saw more or more that addiction enters a person through an object, whether it’s a substance or a type of movie or Facebook, and then exploits the person by making the person want more and more of the object until the person can’t use anymore. If left untreated, addiction will kill. While the person is under addiction’s spell, he or she is totally at addiction’s mercy; every thought, word, and behavior is geared towards getting the object of entry.
The more people who addiction enters means that addiction grows and persists its life. Just like the malevolent spirits in Insidious, addiction exploits the human realm and then grows itself among our ranks. Heck, addiction even progresses in an insidious way; that is, insidious means to proceed in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects. People succumb to addiction’s clutches usually over a lengthy span of time. Though there are those who report having been addicted since the first time they picked up, the effects usually take time to manifest. But harmful effects always manifest through an addiction.
Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but perhaps the Insidious franchise is intentionally meant as a metaphor for addiction and I never realized it before. Maybe the movie’s creators want their audience to see that addiction is in fact a malevolent spirit mining humanity for its own selfish existence.
Then again, maybe Insidious is just a movie and I think too much.
