The Conjuring

A common complaint I hear about horror movies is that they are predictable. if you have seen a few scary movies, you can always tell where the scares are coming. Someone looks down into a sink, you know when they look back up, something scary will be in the mirror. Close the fridge door and BAM, someone will be there. A scary sound, quiet creepy music, then a cat jumps out and screams. It is a genre that only has a few real moves. My students said that scary movies did not scare them. They were too unrealistic to be scary in a world where they live with real fear. I do not want to go into some long post 9-11 babble here, but that is what my students said. They live in real fear, so slashers, ghosts and demons do not scare them. However, horror movies still do insane business at the box office, so the genre is doing something right. Summer is not typically a big horror movie time. This year we already saw the Purge come and go pretty quickly. it made like 75% of its profit on opening weekend. The movie had an insanely wonderful premise, but the execution was massively flawed leaving me unfulfilled. I love scary movies. I love all the different kind of horror. I love monsters, ghosts, slasher films, demon possession films, all of it. The Conjuring was that rare horror movie that was getting good reviews from critics, who are generally not impressed with horror films. It had a great creative team behind it. Guys who worked on the first Saw, Paranormal Activity and the best horror movie of the last few years, Insidious were all apart of this story. Plus, unlike so many horror movies that say they are based on a true story, The Conjuring actually is. Ed and Lorraine Warren were actual people who actually were ghost/demon hunters. They were hugely successful/infamous in the 1970s and were the people who brought the Ammityville house story to the world. The Conjuring is truly based in real life. I have no idea how much of it is true, or anything like that. However, you can see the artifacts from the two cases covered in this film, so who knows.

Ed and Lorraine Warren(Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) are professional ghost hunters who also give seminars on their cases. They have national media attention and they keep the artifacts from their cases locked in a room in their house that a priest blesses once a month. They are not affiliated with the church, but they are respected by the church and they are the ones who gather evidence of possible other worldly beings roaming the Earth. They know how to determine if something supernatural is going on, or if your house is just squeaking. Lorraine is very in tune to the spiritual world. She is a medium and Ed handles most of the technical stuff. When the movie starts they are at a seminar talking about the Annabelle Doll case. It is a super creepy doll that these twenty somethings allowed a spirit to inhabit, but goes crazy. This is our introduction to the these people and they are about to get very important as they get called on another case. Roger and Carolyn Perron (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) recently bought a house out in the middle of nowhere and they moved their four daughters in to begin fresh. it is not long before the creepiness begins. First, the dog refuses to go in the house, which is the first clue that some seriously twisted stuff is going on. Late at night when all of the kids are asleep, one of the daughters feels a tugging at her leg. There is a boarded up basement, one daughter sleep walks and keeps banging into the wardrobe. Carolyn keeps waking up with bruises that she has no recollection of getting. From there it starts to get very scary. The daughter whose leg was getting tugged sees something in the corner staring at her, the other daughter sees nothing, until she feels something, but we never see it. The mom hears children giggling when all of her kids are asleep. As it piles up, eventually Carolyn seeks out the Warrens and they discover a whole mess of insanity at that house, but it began with a Salem Witch. Now it stalks the house and possesses any mother who lives there and then kills children.

The Conjuring is, far and away, the most effective horror movie I have seen in a very long time. There are others that are good, but 90% of horror movies completely fall apart with the ending. The Conjuring does not. it has a solid ending with just a subtle nod to the possibility of continuing. There is no abrupt shaky camera ending, no totally bizarre whacked out ending. It ties up the story in a believable way and throughout the movies scares the crap out of you. In my introduction I mentioned how horror movies have a tendency to be predictable. The Conjuring takes exactly what we expect and throws it in our face. In the first truly scary scene, after the terrifying doll prologue, we see nothing. The daughter is panicked because she sees something and the other daughter can feel it eventually, but we see nothing, so later in the film, when that same daughter sees something, we expect one of two things 1) that we will see nothing, or 2) we will have something jump out at us from the wardrobe, bursting out through the clothing. Neither one of those things happen and what does happen sent the entire sold out auditorium to jump or make noise. I think I even screamed a little bit and I never scream at movies. This is what the Conjuring does so well. It understands the tropes of horror movies. People go into the basement and nothing happens, then someone goes into the basement and what happens is terrifying even though it is in the trailer, but when someone is forced into the basement, some truly scary stuff goes down. We cannot even get mad at the character, because she did not choose to be down there. There are a dozen of these creepy little moments that just build and build and the movie succeeds in ways most horror movies do not.

Yes, creepy children, pictures falling down, someone dragged by their hair by an unseen entity, a creepy basement and demons are all familiar territory for horror, but what this movie does so well, is it uses those familiar topics in fresh and exciting ways. Plus, the acting is above what you normally get in horror. The four girls are all great, the parents are great and Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are exceptional. They not only sell the horror, they sell the desperation, the sadness, the worry and eventually the will to beat this thing. However, for me, the most impressive thing about this film is how it looks. James Wan, a talented director, has this movie looking down right Hitchcockian. Not saying the movie is at the level of an Alfred Hitchcock film, but Hitchcock essentially made horror films, but he elevated them because of how exquisitely he shot them. Every shot looked perfect. Wan achieves that here. I love all of the wide shots of the house, and how he seemed to know exactly when to use those wide shots. The house is dressed perfectly, so we are constantly looking at everything in the frame. There is this wonderfully shot sequence towards the end where we have two separate scenes of action going on in the house and the camera twists and turns between the two, giving them equal importance, leveling the insanity of a demon possession with the very real fear of looking for a missing child. The camera weaves between the two with such fluid motion, it feels alive. However, the best sequence of the film does not even involve the main characters. It involves the Warren's daughter. Shot with this perfect wide shot, the daughter, in colorful pajamas is walking the down red stairs, with the wallpaper almost matching the daughter and as she is walking the hallway is getting darker and closing in on her, and the way it is shot is so wonderful that I was not sure if I was scared or just out of breath at how gorgeous the shoot was. If nothing else, The Conjuring is the most beautifully shot horror movie in ages.

I love a good scary movie and The Conjuring delivers on everything. There were great jumps, great scares, an interesting story, and just some gorgeous cinematography and perfectly maneuvered camera work. It is that rare horror movie where you actually hope for a sequel, instead of just accepting that there will be one. if the series follows the Warren's different cases, there is no reason to believe that this cannot turn into one of the best horror franchises out there, if they are able to keep the team intact. James Wan has impressed me before, but here he takes it to a whole new level. His direction and understanding of light and dark and quiet and loud, and pacing and how to turn our own expectations against us made this movie the horror event of the year.

P.S. That Clapping hands game is straight up perfect for the horror genre. How did no one do that before this movie?

Final Grade: A