“Insidious 3” will be hitting theaters soon, and its lead actor, Dermot Mulroney, who plays the role of Sean Brenner, has recently spoken up about his role in the horror flick.

Mulroney’s character is the father of Quinn Brenner, the young girl who later became the target of the spirits from The Further.

“The film really has a heart,” Mulroney said in an exclusive interview with Screen Rant. “You know that something bad is coming. But, what the film maker is really doing is softening you up for that one-two punch.”

“You come in to play this realistic dad and get your family through this period of grief and recovery,” he added. “Of course, that is when the bad guys on the other side know this family is vulnerable. They use my daughter as a conduit to the living. They want to kill her and drag her to The Further. And we do everything we can to keep her safe.”

Although director Leigh Whannell incorporated some plot lines that rooted from a father-daughter premise, he revealed to The Source that the “first and foremost goal was to be scary.”

“That is really the directive of the ‘Insidious’ movies – to terrify audiences,” Whannell admitted. “The other goal was to emotionally engage the audiences. I wanted this film to have a true emotional spine, and not have the family drama element be an obstacle, but have it be heart-wrenching for the audience.”

Whannell made “Insidious 3” into something a bit “cathartic,” embedding in it a “real life aspect” that its audience can easily find quite relatable. “So, I tried to pay equal attention to each goal, while giving them the fear they paid for.” What will make the third installment of the “Insidious” franchise unique is the “emotional response” that Whannell will manage to coax out of the film’s viewers.

This emotional response will most likely be stimulated by Sean’s relationship with his daughter Quinn, the character that Stefanie Scott plays. Mulroney and Scott were able to bond like a real-life father and daughter, which proves how flexible they both are in their acting.

“It was made easy by Stefanie Scott – just a really appealing young person and really talented,” Mulroney told Screenrant. “It did not take a lot of work for us to have an established, unique rapport. There is the on-screen father-daughter relationship, and, also, a sort of friendship, too.”