It started with Tom Cruise and a rope.

In Mission: Impossible, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt dangles from the ceiling of an extra-secure vault in Langley, the CIA headquarters, to hack a computer protected by state-of-the-art technology. It’s a heist performed on the head of a pin. Any noise louder than a whisper could set off the alarms. Any rogue sweatdrop could be picked up by sensors. Hunt and his team manage to eke out a successful heist, but not before things almost go horribly wrong: Hunt is sent tumbling until he’s inches off the ground, waving his arms wildly to regain his balance.

It’s the most enduring image of the movie, and arguably of the entire franchise. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t the stunt that Mission: Impossible stunt coordinator Greg Powell thought would be the film’s big standout moment.

“I thought it would be the train sequence,” Powell tells Inverse, referring to the climactic scene where Cruise fights Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps and Jean Reno’s Franz Krieger atop a moving train (and almost gets skewered by a helicopter rotor blade in the process).

But it didn’t take Powell long to realize which sequence would go on to become an iconic pop culture moment. “It's been copied 1,000 times, commercials, cartoons,” he says. “I wish I'd had pay in that stunt, because it's been shown over and over again.”

It’s an unsettling feeling that many know all too well: the foreboding suspicion that someone, or something, is behind you. That feeling has morphed over the years into a trope, one that became a mainstay in horror, and for good reason. But how effective can that concept be when employed time and time again?

When the original Insidious film swept the horror world in 2010, director-writer duo James Wan and Leigh Whannell showed audiences that the trope could be a strategic smoking gun for scares that would become iconic within the genre. Thirteen years and several installments later, Insidious: The Red Door returns to The Further and brings a smart and impressive use of the franchise’s best trope along with it.