Patrick Wilson has become something of the poster boy for “When Good Actors Do Horror.”

One thing you can be sure of, when Wilson does an “Annabelle,” “Insidious” or “Conjuring” movie, when something that can’t be happening starts happening, he’s going to give you an award-worthy interpretation of puzzlement, alarm and freaking the f-out.

Wilson co-stars in, steps behind the camera to direct and even sings in the closing credits song in his latest, “Insidious: The Red Door.” The movie’s a near triumph of murky tone and general spookiness. And the acting is sharp, up and down the line, another testament to actors turning director. They know what their players need.

The plot? It’s a muddle, especially if all these titles run together and the through-line of this “Poltergeist” derived saga of a family being sucked into “The Further” isn’t fresh in your memory.

Wilson doesn’t help matters in this regard by showing up in three horror franchises concurrently. They can’t help but get mixed up in the memory. “Insidious” is the one co-starring Rose Byrne. Vera Farmiga plays his better half in the “Conjuring” and “Annabelle” films about the “Amityville” investigators, the Warrens.

In “The Red Door,” the Lamberts have broken up. Josh (Wilson) has just lost his mother (Barbara Hershey, remembered in a photo), and that trauma may be triggering things in him that Renai (Byrne) had just as soon not have around.

A prologue tells us that after the last “Insidious” visitation from “The Further,” Josh and tween son Dalton were hypnotized and told to erase “the past year.”

Now Dalton (Ty Simpkins) is an aspiring artist headed off to college, and Josh is having recovered-memory flashbacks. Father and son aren’t communicating, which is a pity. Because if Josh remembers anything, it might be the “astral projection” that goes on when one dozes off under the right conditions.

Mom, who didn’t go under hypnosis, might have clearer answers, but she’s busy raising their other two kids and she’s not talking.

Josh is visited and haunted at his mother’s house. Nightmare-tormented Dalton has only his accidental college roomie Chris’s (Sinclair Daniel) Black Girl Magic, empathy and facility with Google Search to lean on.

The movie features the requisite jolts, few of which have much punch. But the first truly creepy thing in it is a lulu. Josh is texting in his parked SUV, unaware of the unfocused, grunge-attired figure behind his car which is barely discernable as human. Ish.

The film’s depiction of college life is an amusing mix of cliches — the frat “baby” party (wearing diapers, eating “diaper pudding” out of other diapers) — and a bracing college art class built around two bravura scenes with Hiam Abbass (“Blade Runner: 2049,” “The Visitor” and “Munich”). She plays the demanding professor whose “dredge up your darkest, innermost thoughts” is what triggers Dalton to start having nightmares and “astral projection” strolls and forces him to recover memories he was hypnotized out of at age 10.

Wilson doesn’t utterly lose the thread, but “The Red Door” tends to meander, over-decorating the monstrous “Entity” scenes, reaching for “explanations” that explain nothing other than “This franchise will go on” and serving up a little Tiny Tim to set the mood.

One sure way to gauge a horror film’s success is whether it shocks and shakes you, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. That never happened for me, here. For all the interesting performances and promising characters in this one, I think the actor/director and actor’s director lets us off the hook entirely too easily.

Well at least he gets to sing again, if only over the properly creepy rocker playing under the closing credits.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror, frightening images, strong language and suggestive references

Cast: Ty Simpkins, Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Sinclair Daniel, Hiam Abbass and Lin Shaye..

Credits: Directed by Patrick Wilson, scripted by Scott Teems, based on Leigh Whannell’s characters and story. A Sony/Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:47