The Conjuring Series - The Full Rundown!
So I watched all The Conjuring movies recently in chronological order which in my opinion is the best way to watch them. If you watch them in theatrical release order there are some long stretches that might make you give up watching the whole series, these lows are up against extreme highs which of course makes the lows seem lower. Watching in chronological order avoids that and keeps the quality at about an even pace throughout, besides, it makes the recasting of the nurses in Annabelle a lot more obvious and in turn, more comical.
Here are my thoughts on the series, plus my thoughts on a whole lot of other stuff because I can’t keep focus.
The Nun
So of all the entries in the Conjuring Universe this is the one that a lot of people kind of don’t like. And when I say kind of, I mean people go out of their way to mention how bad it is to which I respond, “If you think this is bad, you need to watch more horror”, because I’ve watched Ghoulies 3 and The Nun is 1000 times better than Ghoulies 3. Now one of the biggest complaints about this movie that people have is the use of jump scares which I will save my opinions on this subject for later in the article but I think the big reason for people not liking The Nun is because it’s not a horror movie. Mostly...let me explain.
Every year for October I assemble a horror movie watch list for my family. I pride myself not only on my film selections but for the flow in which the watch list goes. Every year I give an overall theme to the month, this year is haunted houses. Each week has a theme ranging from the simple “Vampires” to the more complex “Hated sequels that are actually really good”. I take great pride in my ability to match up movies for a doubleheader to make sure that the theme, pacing, context and overall vibe of the two movies matches perfectly. I mention all of this because if I was going to make a perfect double header I would pair The Nun with 1999’s The Mummy before I would pair it with any other horror movie.
At its base, The Nun is an adventure movie trying to be a horror movie. Typically in a horror movie there is someone to save, someone to rescue, someone to protect from the ancient evil haunting the main characters. In The Nun, there is none of this, instead there is a mystery to uncover, a journey to take part in and long forgotten artifacts to unearth. Sure it’s dark, all the doors creak and the score is a bunch of violins which might make you think this is a horror movie but remember when Sister Irene, Frenchie and Father Burke descend into the catacombs underneath the old abbey in search of a vial that contains the blood of Christ? That this is an adventure movie.
Annabelle: Creation
Calling it “The Conjuring Universe” is really a misnomer as the films represent two distinct universes that sometimes cross paths. First there is the Conjuring Universe that starts with The Nun and sets up the events in The Conjuring and beyond and then there is the Annabelle Universe which is mentioned in the Conjuring Universe but is for the most part disconnected. Sure, the Warrens are shown taking Annabelle at the beginning of The Conjuring and the doll is in the house in Annabelle Comes Home but other than that, these are two different worlds. It reminds me of the comic book days where they had the Avengers in New York doing their Avenger stuff and they had a separate group of Avengers in California with totally different storyline and characters. Yes, they are still the Avengers but it’s a different setting and a different mythos.
Annabelle: Creation is one of the most absolutely terrifying movies I have ever seen hands down. The atmosphere is thick, the scares are plentiful and the film does a fantastic job of going from a bit of a slow burn in the first two acts of the film with creaking doors and things hidden in the shadows to an all out screaming demon bit of insanity in the third act as Annabelle cranks her demon powers up to 11 and literally cuts people in half.
Sound design is a very interesting piece of the Conjuring/Annabelle Universe films, they often use audio to enhance the visual scares in unique and interesting ways. For instance in Annabelle Comes Home there is an awesome scene where Day After Day by Bandfinger is playing on the record player and someone knocks on the door. The record starts skipping and looping. The main character asks who’s at the door and the spectral entity says Annabelle and the music begins to warp and twist into insanity. In Conjuring 3 when Arnie succumbs to the demon witch it’s set to Blondie’s Call Me in a weird psychedelic, demonic twist, not to mention Patrick Wilson singing Elvis in The Conjuring 2. Annabelle: Creation takes this all a bit further as you can easily call it an ASMR film. All the dialogue is in hushed, whispered tones. Everything creaks, scrapes, hinges and whines as the main characters are hunted by the malevolent entity attached to the doll.
While I suggest you watch The Nun with a fresh set of eyes, re-watch Annabelle: Creation with a fresh set of ears and you will find yourself awestruck at the immaculate sound design.
Annabelle
Some people will say “Only God can judge me” and I will say that they are wrong because I judge and I most certainly am not God. Sometimes you can look at a director's filmography and know exactly what they are all about. Annabelle was directed by John R. Leonetti who’s filmography includes Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and The Butterfly Effect 2, judging by his past I was hesitant about what he would be able to pull off with the first Annabelle stand alone film. Imagine my shock when the film is much better than the director’s filmography would suggest.
Now that’s not to say that it’s the best film, it’s just not Butterfly Effect 2 levels of bad. In the scares department, it’s fairly weak. Sure there are the creaking doors and spooky stuff in the shadows but in comparison to the rest of the series, the scares are light and almost non-existent. Where the film excels is laying out all the important details around the Annabelle mythos which is explored further in the prequel as well as the sequel. It’s pretty amazing that there are no continuity errors between this film and the prequel considering different directors and writers. You can watch the films in chronological order without feeling like you are watching them out of release order.
Here at Horror Bound we tend to keep things positive but I am going to say some bad things about this film. I have never seen someone sew as much as the main character of this film sews. Seriously, no one has ever sewed this much in their entire life. I get that the film is set in the later 1960’s but the almost comical amount of sewing the stay at home mother main character does is too much. Not to mention the overly stereotypical ‘60s husband who dismisses everything his wife says. If he just randomly said “Dumb broads worrying about ghosts too much, get back to sewing” it wouldn’t seem out of place. Also, it’s clear the director of this film loved Rosemary’s Baby because I am pretty sure the film takes place in the same exact apartment complex.
Even with all the criticisms, the elevator scene is pretty damned scary…
The Conjuring
I’m not even going to talk about this absolute classic of a film. If this is not one of your top horror films of the 21st century then you are just a crazy person who irrationally hates jump scares…
Overall, the conjuring films are some of the best of this century so far. The original conjuring is an absolutely terrifying gem of a film that started a movement of films that tried for true atmosphere and scares, bucking the trend of extreme gore like Saw and Hostel. During the gore heavy craze of the late 2000‘s where films were trying to be more gross than the last Saw movie that was released, James Wan popped back up and did the completely opposite of Saw by releasing a movie with almost no blood, no guts, no sadistic torture and was able to earn an R rating by the MPAA for nothing but extreme terror. No gimmicks. Just plain scary.
If you were to look at social media you would think this is a terrible movie because people hate it because of its use of jump scares. For some reason in the internet horror community jump scares are seen as cheap and sophisticated, horror fans don’t like them. Why? I’ll tell you why.
See you’re sophisticated. You watched Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf in it’s original Swedish with no subtitles and you have Night of the Hunter on criterion collection special edition blu-ray. You watched the 57 hour director's cut of Midsommar and you have a poster of Ti West and Robert Eggers hanging over your bed and you see jump scares are beneath you.
A common tactic for the common viewer.
The problem is despite all your sophistication and despite all the countless hours you spent analyzing Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, the jump scares still get you. They are telegraphed at times and you see them coming but when they happen a little bit of your body is caught off guard. You jump a little bit and in the back of your sophisticated ass horror fan mind you think;
“Shit he got me. I’m too smart to get got by a jump scare.”
In the immortal words of Ice-T; “Anyone can get it”
At the end of the day jump scares aren’t a cheap tactic. They are the best tool for directors to reach out the screen and grab the viewer. In fact this is the best and most effective tool to do this in all of cinema. Marvel needed 20 movies to make you sad about Iron Man dying. Hell even the legendary George Lucas needed two Star Wars films to make you feel some type of way about Han being frozen in carbonite or Darth being Luke’s Dad. But a horror movie only needs 30 seconds of a character walking down a dark hallway before it reaches off the screen and grabs you, scares you and makes you feel the most primal and raw of all human emotion. Fear.
Besides, What else are you supposed to be afraid of in a horror movie? A sense of existential dread? Symbolism related to the expression of grief?
Oh, it’s worth noting that hide and go clap was created for this goddamn movie…
Annabelle Comes Home
Earlier on I mentioned that there are two separate universes, The Conjuring Universe and the Annabelle Universe, perhaps I came to this conclusion by watching the films in chronological order. Doing so, 3 of the first 5 films are Annabelle related and while Annabelle Come Home is set in the Warren’s house, it has all the traits of an Annabelle film.
At its heart, this is a horror movie for kids. Sure it’s rated R, but so are all of the films in the Conjuring Universe but some of this might be a marketing ploy. Typically a film is rated R if they say the fuck word or show nudity, in fact there are tons of horror films that seem to have nudity or bunch of fucks just to get an R rating and avoid the dreaded PG-13 that the internet horror community hates so much. Annabelle Comes Home is completely devoid of all the R rated stuff that you would typically get with a film centered around two teenage babysitters. These baby sitters don’t get drunk, do drugs or engage in pre-marital sex. Instead, the babysitters just babysit the kid and bake her a cake.
There is a common misconception that just because a film is made for kids that it can’t be scary. Annabelle Comes Homes is absolutely terrifying for all ages and it has almost nothing to do with the creepy doll. You see, Annabelle is a conduit for evil/dead/occult shit and the Warren house is filled with evil/dead/occult shit and she uses her powers to bring it all to life and I want a spring off movie for all of it. There is a werewolf made of mist, a TV that projects the future, a haunted wedding dress, a haunted piano, a haunted game of feely neely and hell, there is even a haunted Samurai suit of armor although it’s entirely possible that Ed Warren thought it was cool and just made up some BS about it being haunted so he could take it home.
A lot of people say this is the most fun film out of the bunch and I would argue it’s because it’s a kids movie…
The Curse of La Llorona
Again, another movie in the Annabelle Universe side, although there has been some debate lately about this film actually being part of the universe. Sure, the director came out and said it’s not technically part of the universe and HBO does not list the film in the Conjuring universe section but they are wrong, basically. One of the main characters in the film is the priest from the first Annabelle film who helps the young family while waiting for the Warrens and is almost killed by Annabelle when he tries to take her into a church. He literally has more screen time in official Universe films than Valek or Frenchie but somehow The Nun is canon and La Llorona is not. Perhaps it is because The Nun’s Sister Irene is implied to be Lorraine Warren’s mother, I mean, she is played by Vera Farmiga’s sister or perhaps it’s because the film was a box office flop.
When it comes to La Llorona aka The Crying Woman it’s a part of horror film history as old as Frankenstein and Dracula. While Bela Lugosi was terrifying American audiences as Dracula, Ramon Pereda was stealing the screen in La Llorona aka The Crying woman. It’s one of the oldest Spanish language horror films that I am aware of, second only to the Spanish version of Dracula made in 1931 which is the same exact film as the Bela Lugosi classic just with a different, spanish speaking cast. It’s an absolute must watch, but I digress. La Llorona mythology pops up again in horror history with La Llorona released in 1960 and then again with 1961’s La maldición de la llorona which is the best of the bunch and is most certainly a film that any fan should seek out.
Personally I absolutely love this film but I’ve had a love affair with Mexican Horror since I first watched Santo vs The Vampire Women…
The Conjuring 2
The Conjuring 2 may not be the best film in the series. In fact, it might be one of the most needlessly complicated films in the series where it constantly flips between the haunting being real and being a hoax as well as inserting Valak the Nun for absolutely no reason but to give her a standalone film. What this film does is it really experiments with the concept of a horror film.
For starters, the film doesn’t take place in some creepy old mansion in the countryside where the baroness of the land was murdered and haunts the halls of the sprawling mansion forever. Instead it takes place in the city, in a low income housing unit provided by the state and the ghost is just a grumpy old man who died in his sleep. This drastically changes the stakes for the victims of the haunting. They can’t just pick up and move to a new location and the ghost can't be reasoned with in the normal way. Usually a ghost wants you to uncover some mystery, find out the cause of it’s death or its purely malevolent in nature and just wants a soul. Old Man Bill just wants these damn kids to get out of his house and stay out of his chair.
Next is how the haunting actually works. The ghostly spirits in Conjuring 2 move their victims through space and time, transporting them to different locations within the house and defying the laws of physics and gravity as they do so. The main victim Janet is pulled off of her bed and through the floor where she finds herself dangling from the ceiling. The ghost transports her to a locked room and finally stuffs her into a wall. I can’t think of any other horror movie where the ghost has these powers. More than just the powers is the way the film conveys the possession. There is a clever scene where young Janet is asked to conjure up Old Man Bill for a little chat and in the shadows you can see her transform from a sweet young girl to a nasty old man.
The final thing they do and perhaps it’s the most interesting is they inject the human element into the film in a huge way. As much as the film is about the Enfield Haunting and spooky ghosts, it’s also about Ed and Lorraine Warren’s relationship, so much so that at times it feels like a romance film. Often horror films skip the part where you actually want to care about the characters but this film spends more time on that than the actual monsters and it’s fantastic.
Not to mention Patrick Wilson singing Elvis…
The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It
Now if you thought Patrick Wilson playing Elvis in part two was some emotional heart-wrenching cinema then nothing will prepare you for what you are going to see in part three. To some, they might be disappointed by this film, after all the trailer makes it seem like an all out thrill ride full of intense scares and even some action sequences but the reality is that the film is much more subtle than the trailer will lead you to believe. Sure, it’s about the real life story of the Arne Johnson murder but that is a whole 2 minutes at the beginning of the film, actually it’s exactly 2 minutes and 14 seconds, the length of Blondie’s Call Me. The exorcism that led to the killing, while extremely intense, is very short as well. Often with movies you hear people say that all the good stuff is in the trailer and with The Conjuring 3 there is a lot in the trailer but it’s basically the first third of the movie, from there is all the good stuff that’s not in the trailer.
After the brief opening exorcism and Arne’s murder set to Blondie, we follow the Warren’s as they are absolutely in love with each other, that’s it, that’s the whole movie. Well, they spend most of the movie hunting down a demon witch from the cult of the ram who battles Lorraine Warren with psychic powers, Ed has a heart attack and the creators of the film try to convince the viewer that Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are old, but overall the film is about how much Ed and Lorraine are in love. Furthermore the film shows the strong bond of love between Arne and Debbie. It’s really very interesting because the horror almost takes a back seat to the deeper exploration of the love from these two couples. Don’t get me wrong, the scares are still there and they are very intense but the writing for the characters is so much better and brings this film high above the others not only in the series but in the genre as a whole.
Oh, and the final scene might make you cry…
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