Insidious' Creepy Ghost Kid Wasn't Actually A Kid At All

Before the "Insidious" films became a full-on horror franchise — with the fifth installment, Insidious: The Red Door, arriving on July 7, 2023 — James Wan and Leigh Whannell delivered a horrifying ghost story about a family plagued by a variety of malevolent spirits. One of those ghosts is The Dancing Boy, who terrorizes Rose Byrne's Renai Lambert and taunts her with childlike mischief from beyond the grave.

In the behind the scenes featurette found on the "Insidious" physical media release, James Wan discussed his process behind developing The Dancing Boy character. "I knew I wanted a creepy kid in the film, a creepy ghost kid, but I didn't want the kid to be played by an actual child," said Wan. "I knew I wanted it to be played by a grown-up." I love that Wan used the expression "grown-up," instead of "adult," because it captures such a specific way of looking at humanity. An adult is someone who pays taxes. A grown-up is someone who just happens to be older than a child.

Costume designer Kristin M. Burke enjoyed her part in helping bring the character to life. "The Dancing Boy was really great to create," she said. "Ben Woolf played him, and he is a small guy but my feeling always was that it kind of had to be something that was from the early 20th century, so anywhere from, like, 1900 to 1912, in that range." As she explained, the hope was that if the audience had seen photos or images from that time period, The Dancing Boy would be immediately familiar and definitively out of place for the modern setting.

The "Insidious" team struck gold with Ben Woolf, a talented performer who delivered another memorable horror performance the following year.

In 2011, Ben Woolf joined the cast of "American Horror Story: Freak Show" to play the character Meep. Set in 1952, his character was one of the many human oddities as part of the Elsa Mars Freak Show, fulfilling the role of the "carnival geek." During this time period, "geeks" were hired to chase live chickens, the performance usually ending with the geek biting the chickens' heads off and swallowing them. Meep was of limited vocabulary but more than made up for it with his huge personality.

Sadly, the character met a tragic fate as one of the season's early inciting incidents. This wasn't Woolf's first time playing in show creator Ryan Murphy's sandbox, as he appeared during the first season of the series as Thaddeus Montgomery, aka "The Infantata," the reanimated being made of Charles and Nora Montgomery's deceased child.

Wolf was diagnosed with pituitary dwarfism as a child and grew to the height of 4 feet 4 inches by adulthood. He was also a beloved preschool teacher before setting his sights on acting. His acting career began to blossom shortly after his "Insidious" and "American Horror Story" roles, appearing in the anthology film "Tales of Halloween" and "Haunting Charles Manson." Sadly, Woolf passed away in 2015 due to a stroke resulting from a head injury he received after a traffic accident. His passing was an immense loss, exacerbated by the fact it was obvious that he was well-loved by horror fans and was heading toward a long, successful career. 

A talented performer lost too soon, but at least we'll always have these characters to remember him by.