Insidious Demons: Every Demon and Spirit Explained

The Lipstick-Face Demon is credited in Insidious (2011), Insidious: Chapter 3 and Insidious: The Red Door (as Lipstick Demon), played each time by Joseph Bishara, who also composed the score for all six films. The plot outlines of those same three films feature a red-faced demon instead. The credits and the plot outlines use different names, and no source states that they are the same figure, so the scenes below follow the plot wording.

In insidious 2011, Josh's mother Lorraine is troubled by a vision of a red-faced demon before she calls in the psychic Elise Rainier. Elise explains that Dalton is not in a coma. His spirit has wandered into the Further, and Josh must follow to bring him back. Josh passes through the haunted realm, faces the demon and finds his son, and the two escape back to their bodies.

A red-faced demon returns at the very end of insidious chapter 3. Back at her home, Elise's dog barks at something unseen, and the demon is shown watching her from behind. That image links the prequel to the first film's world.

In insidious the red door, Dalton sees the red-faced demon from his childhood again after he projects into the Further while his roommate Chris guards his body. The demon later takes over Dalton's body and goes after Chris, and Josh frees his son. It then chases them to the red door, and Josh stays behind to hold it shut while Dalton escapes. Dalton paints over the red door in black, which seals the Further.

A fuller profile sits on the lipstick face demon character page.

The Long-Haired Fiend is a creature credited to J. LaRose as Long Haired Fiend in Insidious (2011), and the credit is the only detail published about it. No plot outline of the film names it or says what it does, so any account of its role would be guesswork.

The film around it is clearer. Elise explains that Dalton has wandered into the Further, where restless spirits want to use his empty body to return to the living world. Josh then travels into the Further, faces the demon and locates his son, and the two escape back to their bodies.

If you want a monster with a documented story, the Bride in Black and KeyFace are the better entries. The fiend earns its place here because the first film gives it a credited name.

The Old Woman is the spirit that first targeted Josh Lambert in his boyhood and then reappears wearing his body in the closing minutes of Insidious (2011). Philip Friedman is credited in the part, and she is the reason the family is still in danger once the haunting appears to be over.

Her history is told late, through Elise. Josh could travel into the Further as a child, just as Dalton can, and he pushed the memory away after this woman's spirit began following him. That buried past explains why his trip into the Further to rescue Dalton carries a hidden cost.

Once father and son are home, Elise is the only one who feels that the evening is not as calm as it looks. She takes a photograph of Josh, and he turns on her and kills her. Renai then finds Elise and the picture, which reveals the old woman's spirit has come back inside Josh. In my reading of the scene, it is a clever twist because the threat was never the demon at all.

The Bride in Black is a ghost in a black wedding dress who haunts Insidious: Chapter 2 and returns in Insidious: Chapter 3, and the sequel explains that the figure is Parker Crane, a killer who dressed as a woman. The first sighting comes in 1986, when Lorraine calls Elise to help a young Josh who is being tormented by a ghostly woman in that dress.

The explanation arrives in the present day of insidious chapter 2. Specs, Tucker and Carl trace the trouble back to Parker, a patient Josh met years earlier. Parker's domineering mother, Michelle, drove him to murder, and her spirit has attached itself to Josh. Josh is taken over and turns on his own family, while Dalton enters the spirit world to find his father. Renai, with Lorraine's help, holds off the possessed Josh, and Elise ends Michelle's spirit for good.

In Chapter 3, Tom Fitzpatrick is credited as the Bride in Black. Elise has been stalked by a Bride in Black every time she crosses into the Further, and she has to fight it off once more on her way to rescue Quinn Brenner.

The demon in Insidious: Chapter 3 is a spirit that wears an oxygen mask and draws people into the Further so it can feed on them. Its arrival is tied to a bad moment for Quinn Brenner, who spots a strange figure on the street, steps out distracted and is struck by a car, breaking both legs.

Once she is stuck in the family apartment in insidious chapter 3, Quinn sees a masked figure and realizes it is the same one from the street. Her father Sean seeks out Elise, who is still mourning her husband. A visit from Specs and Tucker goes wrong when Quinn is briefly possessed. Elise concludes the thing is luring victims across, so she follows it into the Further with the two ghost hunters.

There it appears as her late husband and urges her to end her own life. She sees through the disguise and insists it release Quinn. Elise cannot defeat it alone, and a message from a dead neighbor sends her to call on Lily, Quinn's mother. Lily gives Quinn the nerve to tear the mask away, and the creature suffocates and is destroyed.

Chapter 3 marked Leigh Whannell's first film as director. Quinn's story continues on the quinn brenner page.

KeyFace is the demon with keys for fingers that Elise lets out of the basement as a girl in Insidious: The Last Key, and Javier Botet is credited in the part. The film opens in 1953 in Five Keys, New Mexico, where young Elise is punished by her harsh father, Gerald, for seeing ghosts.

After she opens a red door in the basement, KeyFace gets loose and kills her mother, Audrey. Decades later, in insidious the last key, Elise is an investigator working with Specs and Tucker, and Ted Garza calls her about a haunting in Five Keys. The house turns out to be her childhood home. She uncovers a hidden room in which Ted has been holding women captive, and KeyFace attacks her family, leaving her niece Melissa in a coma.

Elise is dragged into the Further, where the demon keeps the souls he has taken. She learns that KeyFace controlled both her father and Ted, and that he fed on the fear of their victims. Gerald's spirit gives his life to protect Elise, and Audrey's spirit helps the group escape.

A demon with keys for fingers, the same description the plot gives KeyFace, also appears in the post credit scene of Insidious: Out of the Further. Cyrus Lam wakes in the Further, strapped into a dental chair and tortured by a ghostly dentist, before the demon locks him in a cell behind a red door.

The demon works through Elise's own family, and the red door recurs across the saga: in The Last Key, in The Red Door and in the Out of the Further post credit scene.

Not every threat in Insidious is a demon, and several of the most important spirits are human ghosts, such as Ben Burton, Elise's ghost and the dead that Cyrus Lam tries to command. Separating them makes the series easier to follow.

In insidious the red door, Josh begins seeing the ghost of a man and learns that it is his father, Ben Burton, whom he believed had abandoned the family. David Call is credited as Smash Face / Ben Burton. Josh then learns that his father died by suicide in an institution, and Renai explains that Ben also projected but saw it as mental illness. By the end, Ben's spirit guides Josh back to the living world.

Elise Rainier's spirit is also a helper rather than a threat. In Chapter 2, her ghost helps Dalton in the spirit world, and in The Red Door she tells Josh he has a bright future as he passes her on the way out. You can read more about her on the elise rainier page.

In insidious out of the further, the antagonist is Cyrus Lam, a cult leader who promises that the dead can be brought back, and he uses Gemma Hall and her daughter Maya to bring his followers and the dead into the real world. Gemma traps the house in the Further, and Cyrus is consumed by the resurrected dead he sought to command. Gemma also meets her mother Ingrid again in the Further, and the two reconcile.

For the people behind the performances, see the insidious cast page.

In my opinion, the red-faced demon is the scariest of the Insidious demons, and the ranking below is my own taste, not a measurement. It could be argued that a series this reliant on jump scares will always favor the monster that appears most often, and the red-faced demon appears in the plots of three of the six films.

1. The Red-Faced Demon. It has the longest run of any monster on this list, from the vision that troubles Lorraine in the first film to the demon that chases Josh and Dalton to the red door in The Red Door. It works because the films explain so little about it, and the final shot of Chapter 3, with Elise's dog barking at something she cannot see while the demon watches from behind, is a better scare than most set pieces.

2. The Oxygen Mask Spirit. The oxygen mask is a simple, strong design, and the scene in the Further where it takes the form of what looks like Elise's late husband is the most unsettling idea in the series, mostly because of what it asks her to do. The rule that removing the mask destroys it is also a neat piece of monster logic.

3. KeyFace. The Last Key gives it a cruel backstory and a good physical hook in the keys for fingers. In my opinion it loses a little by being tied to Gerald and Ted, because the human villains take up some of the fear that the demon should own.

4. The Bride in Black. The black wedding dress image is strong, and the reveal that it is Parker Crane is clever. That being said, the reveal also takes some of the mystery out of the figure in Chapter 2.

5. The Long-Haired Fiend. It is credited to J. LaRose in the first film, but no plot outline says what it does, so it sits last simply because there is the least to judge.

If you are new to the series, start with Insidious (2011) and the red-faced demon, then move on to Chapter 3 for the oxygen mask spirit. The insidious movies ranked page covers the films themselves.