The Conjuring: A Study in How to Scare
If you’re a horror fan, you’ve already seen The Conjuring. James Wan’s instant classic horror film was a huge box office success, has spawned not only a sequel, but an entire spinoff universe with the Annabelle series, and more recently, The Nun. All of them contain various degrees of well-crafted scares and stories; none, however, are as purely memorable as The Conjuring. The big daddy of them all. The one most described by fans and shooken viewers alike as the one that fucked me up.
I’m not here to retell all the plot of this film, there’s a hundred reviews you can read for that. What it’s time for is an education, it’s time to go back and remember three key aspects that reveal why this movie is so damn terrifying.
Horror is always half-setting. The haunted mansion, the graveyard, the basement -- where our story centers is vital to the scares. The Conjuring is set in 1971, which is recent enough to be familiar, but still able to avoid some of our modern trappings like cell phones. The Perron’s live in a new-to-them house, with creaky floors and a dull white interior. Director James Wan uses a long tracking shot early on in the film as the family explores the house to allow the audience to become, at least somewhat, familiar with the general layout. This works to supreme effect when all the possession and otherwise creepy stuff starts sending characters running and chasing through the home, Wan doesn’t have to stop and explain where we are in the house.
The audience can simply get lost in the fright fest without using any brain power pondering what room is this. Even the property around the house is gothic and eerie with a forlorn lake and massive, storybook rotted tree. The Conjuring delivers a setting worthy of its setup.
Horror fans can often be heard determining the quality of a film based on how good its’ kills are. How our characters meet their fates is part of the ride; sometimes it’s how we get scared, sometimes it’s how exhilarated we feel watching them avoid and survive those pitfalls. There are no human deaths in The Conjuring. None of the five daughters die, nothing befalls the parents, or some hapless paranormal investigator. The only death is the family dog, and even that occurs off-screen and we are left feeling the creepy tension of what happened to her.
What The Conjuring does in place of that -- is give us the hide and clap game. A simple game of blind hide and seek that the Perron daughters play early on to establish the rules of the game. It’s sweet, and cute at the time because Wan doesn’t overly highlight the game initially. Yet when the mother and the youngest daughter play the game later on it takes on a terrifying tone. We watch a blindfolded Lilly Taylor search for her hidden daughter, listening for claps that lead her to a bedroom.
It’s the audience, not the mother, who see the doors of the armoire open by themselves. It’s us who bear witness to the rotten arms that extend from the clothing and see them clap, drawing the mother to it only to be surprised there’s nothing there, and her daughter was in another room entirely. The clap game already has us at this point, it’s lulled us into its terror vibe. The film’s writers pretty much leave the clap game alone after that, but they do make the most of the real estate they built with it by bringing it back for perhaps the film’s most iconic scare.
Early on in the second act, as the mother Perron is folding laundry, she hears two claps — the signal that the game is being played. She goes looking for her daughters, warning them that they should be asleep. A series of loud noises and falling pictures send her running downstairs looking for the source of the noise. She ends up in the basement, where she first suffers a terrible fall down the stairs. When she makes it back to the top, the door is suddenly thrown shut and she’s trapped in pitch dark. She grabs a long match, strikes and peers down into the basement darkness — calling out for who is there. The match goes out, she strikes another, but as everything else has fallen silent and Lilly Taylor is flat out acting her ass off managing the terror and curiosity of the moment. Just then — two hands appear from the darkness inches from her head and — clap, clap. The match cuts out. Lilly screams bloody murder. Everything stays in blackness as she screams. This singular scene provides not only the best scare in the film, it became the trailer’s calling card moment, and almost certainly helped drive audiences into the theatre. In a sea of haunting and possession films — The Conjuring created a truly iconic moment in horror cinema.
A smart, and clever character introduction in The Conjuring actually serves the audience by preparing them to be scared without wasting moments of the actual story. The film opens up with the tale of Annabelle, the doll that’s haunting a few nursing students in 1968. The five-minute mint-movie delivers some truly creepy and deeply unsettling moments, while also introducing us to the Warrens, their job, and their troubling locked room of scary artifacts. This short film provides some nice jump scares, and its overall tale is doubly freaky. The writers and Wan use this to remind the audience they are here to be scared, and once we are already on the edge of our seat nibbling our fingernails, the actual movie begins. We learn so much about the characters we’ll meet from this short that we enter the film’s actual story ready to see what comes next instead with our arms crossed saying, scare me if you can. (Check out our deep dive on Annabelle HERE)
The Conjuring is a modern classic that isn’t totally a possession film, isn’t totally a haunted house film, but is wholly scary. It’s a 5 of 5 film for me. It delivers a story that’s enticing and characters whose journey we care to see through. Most importantly, this is a scary film. Its mix of jump scares and slow build tension is potent combination that pays off even on re-watches. It’s a horror classic of the last decade, and deserves its place on the mantle. This is a must watch or revisit for your Halloween viewing season.
