Director Report Card: James Wan (2016)

8. The Conjuring 2

With "Furious 7" now on his resume, James Wan was officially a member of the Billion Dollar Club. He had started out making low budget horror flicks, transferred to slightly classier and more expensive horror flicks, and was now directing elaborate action blockbusters. Wan claimed he was offered "life-altering money" to return to the "Fast and Furious" franchise and make its eighth installment. Say what you will about Wan and the series of dubious merit he's unleashed on the world, at least he knows which side of his bread is buttered. The man remains loyal to the horror genre. Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema knew "The Conjuring" had franchise potential from the beginning, bringing the Hayes back to start work on a sequel script based on the first's positive test screenings and fast-tracking the "Annabelle" spin-off. Wan, meanwhile, was eager to return to the Warren case files, expressing continued enthusiasm for the concept and contributing to the sequel's script. Reported to have the subtitle "The Enfield Poltergeist" during production, the film would drop in June of 2016 in most territories as simply "The Conjuring 2." 

The Enfield poltergeist is a case that is probably familiar to believers and skeptics of the paranormal. In the Brimsdown neighborhood of the Enfield region of London, resides a humble council house at 284 Green Street. In 1977, single mother Peggy Hodgson lived there with her two daughters, thirteen year old Margaret and eleven year old Janet. The family reported strange noises, furniture moving, and other poltergeist activity. Apparently, the paranormal events were loud enough that the neighbors noticed the strange noises. The incidents become so bad that they called the police, who reportedly witnessed a chair "wobble and slide" across a room without explanation. Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, of the Society for Psychical Research, began to seriously investigate the case. They supposedly saw objects mysteriously thrown across rooms, photographed the girls levitating off their beds, and claimed that Janet could channel the gruff-voiced spirit of an old man named Bill. 

The reports received considerable media attention, especially those photos of the girls levitating... Which more than a few people noticed seemed to simply depict Janet jumping into the air. Janet was also caught thumping a broom against the ceiling, the source of the mysterious noises. Several experts noted that the "channeling" she did was simple ventriloquism. The girls would admit to pranking Grosse and Playfair but the researchers continued to claim the haunting was genuine. It got to the point that other SPR members became dismayed at how easily duped Grosse and Playfair had been. Despite all of that, some continue to point to the Enfield haunting as a legitimate example of supernatural evidence caught on film. As for the involvement of Ed and Lorraine Warren, they showed up for a few days and instructed the investigators to sell the book and movie rights. That, as far as the facts go, was that.  

Not that the facts matter much at all when it comes to "The Conjuring" films. The sequel emphasizes this by opening with Lorraine and Ed doing a séance at the Amityville horror house in 1976, a sequence of questionable taste that recreates the real murders that happened there. The sequel goes off on its own flight of fancy after that: Lorraine has a vision of a demonic nun that climaxes with Ed dying. She becomes concerned that, if they continue their investigation into the paranormal, it will end with her husband's death. Meanwhile, across the ocean, strange events are happening in Enfield, London. The four children of Patty Hodgeson are experiencing frightening visions. The supernatural activity seems to revolve around eleven year old Janet. She sleepwalks, teleports around the house, is at the center of telekinetic episodes, and becomes possessed by the hostile spirits that live there. Local investigators and the media circle around the family, with some wondering if the incident is a hoax. Ed and Lorraine are reluctantly drawn into seeing for themselves. They soon realize that the Enfield haunting is real and that it is connected to Lorraine's troubling reoccurring dreams.

"The Conjuring 2" essentially seeks to repeat the structure of the first film. The story is split in two for much of its runtime. We follow the Warrens as they measure the cost of their supernatural exploits and the love they feel for each other. Meanwhile, most of the meat of the story occurs around a simple family being increasingly vexed by otherworldly horrors until they can take it no more and call in the Warrens for help. Being a sequel, "Conjuring 2" hopes to do the Same Thing But Bigger. Now the paranormal terror the victimized family deals with is far more elaborate, with seemingly multiple threats emerging in the house. More time is spent with the Warrens, Lorraine's visions leading to yet more chances for shrieking sequences of horror. In general, the sequel centers the married demonologists much more in the plot while more-or-less following an extremely similar set-up to the first. Normal family starts dealing with ghost shit and the Warrens ride in to save the day. 

By this point in his career, James Wan was no longer just the "Saw"/"Insidious" guy. With "Furious 7" under his belt, he had proven himself as an expert of bombast and elaborate action scenes. The director definitely brought some of that energy back to the "Conjuring"-verse with him. From its opening minutes, "The Conjuring 2" is already laying on the CGI excess. Lorraine's first vision features loudly edited shots of Ronnie DeFeo murdering his family, CGI debris flying everywhere, and ends with a big digital spike slamming through Ed's chest. The sequel doesn't crank back on the throttle much after that. "The Conjuring 2" is one overdone sequence of computer-assisted fright after another. A friendly pet dog transforms into a twitchy demon in a dapper suit. The angry face of an evil old man leaps from the darkness, shrieking at the girl. The iron gate of a fireplace is flung across the room, huge cracks appear in the ceiling, and people are dragged screaming from their beds. By the time a lightning bolt tears through the heavens and splits a tree on the Hodgeson's lawn in half, the sequel has more than committed itself to being an unending spectacle of terror. 

Is it scary? Not at all. It is definitely extremely loud. Any chance for subtly goes out the window when the stuttering Hodgeson son – an invention of the film – is screamed at by a demonic voice from his play tent. The volume remains high throughout. The sequel is fond of thrusting its horrors directly at the viewer, after the kind of extended build-up that is supposed to create suspense. Instead, watching demon fingers curl around a painting or Ed stumble around the house with blurred vision only makes us anticipate the loudness of the incoming jump-scare. The Crooked Man creaking and twitching down a hallway or the evil nun running towards Lorraine is accompanied by considerable screaming and bellowing. This is a belligerent type of horror movie, that unceasingly hits the viewer over the head with scary faces and loud shrieks in hopes of dulling all our senses. Such an approach can work with an over-the-top action movie but is less effective when applied to a horror film. What is frustrating about this is that James Wan should know better. The first "Conjuring" began with disquieting noises in the night, the sleepwalking daughter bumping her head on a cabinet. It created that sense of normalcy that is so important to horror working. By going for the loud jolts right from the get-go, "The Conjuring 2" can't cook up the same sense of tension. 

While the first "Conjuring" managed to recreate the look and pacing of a seventies spook show, at first anyway, the sequel makes no such attempt. Wan teams here for the first time with Don Burgess, Robert Zemeckis' semi-regular cinematographer since "Forest Gump." Burgess also worked on "Spider-Man," "Terminator 3," and "Enchanted." In other words, he guarantees that "The Conjuring 2" looks smooth and modern. The film is full of multiple long tracking shots, following the characters as they go from room to room, often via flashy camera movements. The integration of CGI into such frames is far from seamless and often draws attention to itself. "The Conjuring 2" has an often overcast color palette, primarily composed of gloomy greys, cold blues, and murky blacks. It does not look like 1977. Aside from some standard set-dressing – a David Soul poster on the girl's bedroom wall, Ed's sideburns, the stereotypical montage set to the Clash's "London Calling" – little attempt is made to capture the look and feel of the late seventies. 

The result is a sequel that uniformly lacks the warmth of the original. The threatened family at the center of "The Conjuring 2" is a lot smaller than that in the first. We have an overworked single mom, shy little Janet, bolder Margaret, and stuttering little Bobby. However, we never get a sense of place and familiarity here as we did in the Perron home. Less attempt is made to flesh out the siblings' relationship or the mom's bond with her kids. The Hodgesons seem less like a family and more like a collection of plot device. The emotional core of the story rests solely with the Warrens this time. This is why the only time the sequel grabs a bit of the chummy atmosphere of the first is when Ed picks up a guitar and warbles off an Elvis song for the Hodgeson kids. We needed more moments like that, when we are simply living with these characters and getting to know them, in-between all the belligerent attempts at scares. Considering "The Conjuring 2" runs two hours and thirteen minutes, you'd think it would have time for more moments such as these, in order to make us care about these characters more. 

The film is certainly trying to get us to care. The script – from the Hayes twins, Wan, and "Orphan's" David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick – tries to build up a theme about family and love. All throughout, Lorraine is driven by her love for Ed, fearful that his life is in danger. There are key scenes where both of the Warrens have a talk with Janet, informing her of how their connection with each other keeps them going in such a scary world. However, this is paired with two other awkward decisions. First off, the longer "The Conjuring 2" goes on, the more stuck it becomes on the "rules" of its supernatural threat. The finale is devoted to Lorraine trying to find the name of the demon behind the haunting, so that she can vanquish it. This sort of video game-style story writing, in which a MacGuffin must be seized to stop the bad guy, feels totally at odds with the emotional reality of the story. It's an imposition on the plot, that moves our concern from Ed's life being in danger to some made-up bullshit about how to exorcise demons. It also sticks Vera Farmiga, already at the center of the sequel's silliest story beats, with all the most awkward, mechanical dialogue. This leads to Farmiga giving a largely stiff performance.

Secondly, "The Conjuring 2" isn't content to merely be about how the people we love keep us going and how they must be protected. The sequel explicitly connects the love of family with religious faith. The investigators who work with the Warrens define their work as looking for something greater. The Warrens have found that higher calling: It is God, specifically the one of the Catholic Church. Both Ed and Lorraine carry crucifixes with them as powerful totems against the demonic forces. They invoke God's name when casting out demons. The final boss takes the form of an evil nun, Lorraine informs us, to "mock her faith." If this is starting to seem less like mainstream Christianity and more like some weird fusion of conservative Catholicism and mysticism, that's exactly what it is. I think "The Conjuring 2" hopes to address the criticism that these movies are ore full-of-shit than the con artists that inspired them. There's plenty of evidence, after all, that the Enfield poltergeist was a hoax and the Amityville haunting was definitively a hoax. These truths are loosely written into the sequel... As events compelled to happen by demons to shake our faith. The skeptics in the film are all depicted as small-minded nitpickers, out to keep the Warrens from saving us from the demons. "The Conjuring 2" fully adopts Lorraine Warren's worldview that her Catholic faith and belief in the supernatural are inseparable and that neither should be questioned. 

One could almost excuse a big budget studio movie assuming this frankly psychotic world view. This was the third entry in the ever-expanding "Conjuring"-verse, after all. The reason so much screen time is given over to the Nun and the Crooked Man manifestations of the central demon is because New Line Cinema was already priming these two ghosts for their own spin-offs. They were presumably introduced into the sequel to be the next Annabelles, to keep the cinematic universe growing. That means "The Conjuring 2" is basically the horror version of "Iron Man 2," detached from our world and governed by its own goofball rules and laws. The Nun's appearance was even the result of a Marvel-style reshoot, replacing a generic demon that presumably didn't have much commercial prospects as a breakout solo act. Comic book storytelling like this has as much to do with the real world as "Lord of the Rings'" Middle Earth does, right? 

Maybe but "The Conjuring 2" does itself no favors by nakedly drawing inspiration from "The Exorcist." Much like little Reagan McNeil, Janet Hodgeson seemingly unwillingly invites the demonic forces in by playing around with a home-made ouija board. Throughout the sequel, we are presented with images of a little girl, croaking in an evil voice, being possessed by a demon that twists her body and scars her skin. The first "The Conjuring" was clearly inspired by "The Amityville Horror," a crass piece of commercial filmmaking whose only valuable subtext was also about monetary concerns. It was easy to do better than that. "The Exorcist," meanwhile, is a classic that grapples with the weight of faith and actually asks questions about the role of good and evil in the world. "The Conjuring 2" has a thoroughly braindead moral – that demons are real and only God, via his proxies of the Catholic Church and the Warrens, can protect us – and sets itself for utter failure by openly imitating a film so much more nuanced and thoughtful like "The Exorcist."

But what do I know? "The Conjuring 2" would become a monster hit in the summer of 2016. The sequel would make slightly less domestically than the original but did gangbusters overseas. Earning over 300 million dollars, it would become the highest grossing horror movie of the year and was, by some calculations, the second highest grossing film in the genre for a while. In other words, Warner Brothers and New Line got the hit they wanted. They got a launching pad for more spin-offs. (Though that "Crooked Man" movie seems to have died on the vine.) Considering the sequel's box office success, clearly audiences were very satisfied with the bombastic approach to the haunting movie. "The Conjuring 2" is a disappointing follow-up to a decent original that doubles down on what annoyed me about the first one, while stripping away the elements that did work for me. I guess, however, in uncertain times such as these, the public cries out for morally sound heroes like Ed and Lorraine Warren. [Grade: C]