From a Super Bowl Ad to the Insidious Franchise: How Jacob Chase Got the Keys to 'Out of the Further'
Jacob Chase once won a snack-chip commercial contest. Now he is directing the sixth film in one of horror's most reliable franchises.
Insidious: Out of the Further opened in theatres on August 21, 2026, via Sony Pictures, collecting $3 million in Thursday previews with a studio-projected opening weekend of around $23 million (The Hollywood Reporter). The film stars Brandon Perea, Lin Shaye, and Amelia Eve, and centres on a young mother who can bring spirits back with her to the real world (The Hollywood Reporter; The Hollywood Reporter). The story is credited to David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Jacob Chase (Sony Pictures).
The path from contest winner to franchise director runs through Steven Spielberg, a parking-lot monster, and two of horror's most powerful producers.
In 2016, Chase won the "Crash the Super Bowl" competition with a Doritos ad called "Doritos Dogs." The prize included a chance to shadow director Zack Snyder on the set of Zack Snyder's Justice League (The Hollywood Reporter). A year later, at the end of 2017, he posted a short film called Larry on YouTube — the story of a parking-lot attendant haunted by a monster that reaches him through touchscreen devices.
That short caught the attention of Amblin Partners, Spielberg's company. Chase sold the feature adaptation rights, and the project was retitled Come Play, with Spielberg involved closely during post-production. Released in October 2020, Come Play topped the Halloween box office in a season gutted by COVID-era theatre closures (The Hollywood Reporter).
More importantly for Chase's career, Come Play won him two admirers: Jason Blum of Blumhouse and James Wan of Atomic Monster, the duo whose companies have steered the Insidious series since the first film in 2010. When Patrick Wilson directed Insidious: The Red Door in 2023 — the franchise's fifth entry — it grossed $189 million worldwide, the highest total in the series. After that result, Blum and Wan tapped Chase to write and direct the sixth instalment (The Hollywood Reporter).
Chase's pitch called for a soft reboot. The Lambert-family storyline that anchored the first five films had concluded in The Red Door, so Out of the Further moves the focus elsewhere while keeping connective tissue to the past. Lin Shaye returns as Elise Rainier, the psychic medium who has been the franchise's spiritual spine, along with the demons she battles in the purgatorial dimension the series calls the Further (The Hollywood Reporter).
For Chase, the assignment is a jump in scale. Come Play was a modestly budgeted release during an extraordinary period for exhibition. Insidious: Out of the Further is a late-August wide release for Sony, carrying a recognised title and a faithful audience into a corridor that has historically rewarded horror. Whether that audience shows up at the projected level will be clear once Monday's actuals replace the studio's weekend estimate.
