Brandon Perea was still carrying the joy of Puerto Rico when the next chapter of Insidious found him.
The Latino/Filipino actor, who first broke out as Angel Torres in Jordan Peele's Nope, had just experienced the island for the first time, reconnecting with his Puerto Rican heritage through its music, food, people, and, yes, Bad Bunny's residency. On the flight from Puerto Rico to Chicago, where he was headed to see family, the script for Insidious: Out of the Further arrived.
"It changed my life," Perea told me of the trip. "There's magic on that island, 100%. The loving people, the music, the food, the culture, everything. To just be connected to that place in that way is incredible."
For Perea, whose father is Puerto Rican, the trip was more than a long-overdue vacation. It came at a personal crossroads, when he felt he needed time away from work and space to reset mentally.
"I was going through a lot of things in my normal life," he said. "I think I needed that trip to give me some peace and some heart, to be like, 'Hey, you're exactly where you need to be. Everything's okay.' Then the script gets sent to me, and it was like, 'Okay, boom, offer, you're ready to go to work.'"
That timing gives Perea's role in Insidious: Out of the Further, the sixth movie in the supernatural horror franchise, an unexpected emotional undercurrent. He plays Nick, the boyfriend of Gemma, a young mother portrayed by Amelia Eve. Gemma discovers that she can enter The Further, the shadowy realm of lost souls that has haunted the Insidious universe since the first film, and even worse, brings its creatures back into the real world.
Nick is caught between the kind of disbelief anyone might feel when faced with demons and the need to stand beside the woman he loves. Perea saw the role through a distinctly cultural lens.
"Normally, if we experience that type of scary, we run away. We're gone," he said, laughing. "So I had to showcase that in my mind, like, in my eyes, you could see normally the response was, 'We're ready to go. We're not going to stay here for this.' But also, there's the girl that he loves."
It is the eternal horror-movie dilemma, with a telenovela twist: stay for love, even when every instinct tells you to run.
"I'll be here for you, but normally I'd be gone and out," Perea said. "There's that line of playing it where it's like, 'I can't fully believe what you're saying, but I'll hear you out. It sounds a little crazy, so I'm going to bounce out.'"
For audiences raised in cultures where ghost stories, spiritual beliefs, and warnings from elders can feel less like fiction and more like family lore, Perea believes the fear lands differently.
"We really believe all that stuff, so it's spooky," he said of his Puerto Rican and Filipino background. "When it's spooky, we run, though. We don't stick around."
Perea has become unusually fluent in surviving the impossible on screen. In Nope, he faced a terrifying presence in the sky. In Twisters, he confronted nature's fury. Now, in Insidious: Out of the Further, he is up against demons with access to the human world.
Asked which threat would frighten him most in real life, Perea did not hesitate for long.
"The Further is really scary because there's so much attacking you and it's so unfamiliar," he said. "In Nope, you have the big UFO, but I'm on Earth still, so I know my escape routes a little bit. I can hide a little bit. Tornadoes, just don't go to the Midwest. Stay away from Kansas, stay away from Oklahoma."
But demons, he said, are another matter.
"In Insidious, there's entities that come to our world. That's scary," Perea said. "We have an army of that. It's like the Avengers of demons that are all coming back for some sort of revenge."
He also singled out the film's unnerving dentist sequence and its claustrophobic atmosphere, promising viewers that the scares do not let up. "It's not stopping," he said. "This is crazy."
With the blessing of Perea himself, perhaps it is time to make it official: horror has a new Latino scream king.
"I am honored," he said. "I hope the audience agrees."
Insidious: Out of the Further, directed by Jacob Chase and featuring Lin Shaye's return as Elise Rainier, opens exclusively in theaters August 21
