In 1943, a teenager from Connecticut named Edward met a devout Catholic girl named Lorraine. Two years later, while on leave from his service in World War II, the couple would marry, officially becoming Ed and Lorraine Warren. Ed claimed to have grown up in a haunted house while Lorraine professed to be a medium and clairvoyant. In 1952, the couple founded the New England Society for Psychic Research. By 1968, the Warrens had made a name for themselves as "psychic researchers," ghost hunters, and lecturers on spiritualism and demonology. They wrote about their adventures, tirelessly self-promoted, opened a museum of haunted artifacts in their home, and claimed to have investigated a mathematically impossible 10,000 cases. After their involvement with the (now thoroughly debunked) Amityville horror story, the Warrens had established themselves as the most famous "paranormal researchers" in the world. Actual evidence for any of their claims is either non-existent or doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. Ed was always pushing for book and movie deals, while generally establishing a belligerent public persona. Lorraine has been described alternatively as a charlatan or a deluded woman thoroughly warped by her conservative Catholic beliefs, who always insisted on a paranormal explanation for everything. (Though was apparently fine with her husband keeping his 15 year old mistress in their house.)
In 1970, Carolyn Perron, her husband Roger, and their five daughters moved into a 235 year old farmhouse in Burillville, Rhode Island, a suburb of Providence. The couple had a tense marriage, Roger's work as a travelling salesman taking him away from home for long periods. During the ten years the family lived in the house, Carolyn and her daughters made numerous claims of ghostly activity. In her amateur research, Carolyn discovered the story of Bathsheba Sherman, a seemingly normal woman who lived next door to the home in the 1800s. After a child in her care supposedly died, Sherman became the subject of a local legend claiming she was a baby-murdering, devil-worshipping witch. Stories that none of her children lived past the age of four or that she was put on trial for piercing an infant's skull with a knitting needle are not supported by historical records. Carolyn reached out to Ed and Lorraine, who immediately claimed the house was haunted. Roger never saw or felt anything unusual. During a seánce with the Warrens, he might have thrown Ed out of the house. Eldest daughter Andrea would go on to write several self-published books about her mother's alleged experiences. The next family who owned the house never reported any weirdness. The current owners, who bought the home after it gained notoriety, run a social media page devoted to showcasing videos of "ghostly activity" captured in the home and are willing to rent rooms to visitors.
In the late eighties, Ed Warren met with producer Tony DeRosa-Grund and played him a tape of an interview with Carolyn Perrin. DeRosa wrote a treatment based on the story called "The Conjuring." He spent the next twenty years trying to get it turned into a movie. After a rewrite from Chad and Cary Hayes made the Warrens the heroes of the story, the script became the focus of a studio bidding war. Eventually, New Line Cinema got the rights. James Wan, hot off the success of "Insidious," came aboard as director. Lorraine served as a consultant on the film, which was briefly retitled "The Warren Files" before reverting back to its original name. The resulting film was a huge commercial and critical hit, solidifying Wan's reputation as a modern master of horror. And that's how the story of two grifters and an overworked mom's fantasies about her drafty old home launched a billion dollar franchise and the most successful horror series of all time.
Taking the Warrens and Andrea Perron's claims at face value, “The Conjuring” fictionalizes nearly everything else. Ed and Lorraine Warren investigate the case of a haunted doll named Annabelle, explaining to her hapless owners that demonic entities seek to possess people, not objects. Two years later, the Perron family move into their new home. The family dog refuses to enter the house and dies in the night. Strange smells permeate the building, the middle daughter sleep walks, and a sealed up cellar is discovered. The paranormal activity seems to circle around Carolyn, who is attacked in the cellar one night. Ed and Lorraine are called in to investigate, quickly determining that the spirit of Satanic witch Bathsheba Sherman seeks to take Carolyn's body for her own and continue her murderous ways. Ed must perform an exorcism to save Carolyn from this evil.
In many ways, “The Conjuring” feels like the horror movie James Wan had been wanting to make his entire career. In retrospect, one can't help but see “Insidious” especially as a test run for this superior spook show. Wan's fascination with ghost hunting intensifies, trading out “Insidious'” New Age nonsense for Lorraine's distinctively different strain of Catholicism influenced nonsense. More importantly, “The Conjuring” builds on the kind of creaky, haunted house boo-show atmosphere Wan established in his last horror picture. You can see how his skills have improved in the very first sequence of “The Conjuring.” The prologue, devoted to the Annabelle haunting, nicely uses sound and off-screen shuffling to make a foreboding little chiller, operating practically as a short film in its own right. Meanwhile, the staring eyes, cracked porcelain face, and grimy clothes of Annabelle represents a maximizing of every creepy doll cliché. (Quite a step-up from the real Annabelle...) Wan learned his lessons from “Insidious” and “Dead Silence,” applying them both to this stellar sequence.
Another important lesson learned from his first haunted house movie is that a sense of normalcy must be established before it can be upset by the supernatural intrusion. “The Conjuring” does not go very far in defining the Perrons. Their five daughters, especially, are never given much individual personality. I can keep track of Christine and Cindy, because I recognize Joey King and Mackenzie Foy, and the youngest daughter gets the most screen time. Otherwise, the girls are interchangeable. However, we get enough scenes of the siblings playing and interacting, goofing off or complaining about farting in their sleep, to grasp their bond. Roger and Carolyn are seen flirting and talking enough that a pleasant coziness is successfully presented. This feels like a real family, full of people who love and care for each other. We may not learn a lot about these people but they sure do seem nice. Not the kind of folks who deserve to be pestered and attacked by demonic spirit at all!
Niceness is, in fact, an unexpected virtue of “The Conjuring” in general. Ed and Lorraine Warren might have been huge jerks in real life but, as portrayed by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, they are a loving couple completely devoted to each other. There are multiple scenes of the two being sweet, simply showing how in love they are with each other. Wilson and Farmiga have such an easy-going, lived-in chemistry together, truly giving the impression of a couple that have been together for a long time. We also see them interacting with and playing with their daughter – something they didn't do a lot of in real life, by the way – furthering the feeling of a comfortable family life. Farmiga adopts an utterly sincere attitude to Lorraine, someone determined to use her gifts to help people and protect those that need. She spits the movie's most ridiculous dialogue with complete conviction, selling the viewer on the idea that Lorraine definitely believes in this stuff. Wilson's Ed is more practical, with a quiet and very Dad-like sense of humor, and seems unsure of himself at times. They are ideal heroes to swoop in and save the imperiled family. When most horror movies are about people unexpectedly thrust into life-or-death situations and forced to survive, there is novelty to protagonists actively going out to fight evil.
"Insidious" set out to be the kind of horror movie that gets its audience to jump as often as possible. With "The Conjuring," you can tell Wan was actively trying to capture a slightly subtler mood. Befitting its early seventies setting, a real attempt was made to capture the look and feel of an older film. Digital shine is discarded in favor of a grainier look, with more depth and warm colors to the frames. This extends to several scenes shot in-universe on a handheld camera and a very "Texas Chain Saw Massacre"-like scrolling wall of text near the beginning, which works surprisingly well. Naturalistic lighting adds to both the coziness of the interiors and the idea that something is lurking in the shadows. Clearly inspired by the original "Amityville Horror," John R. Leonetti's cinematography often adopts a roaming perspective. As if the camera has taken the point of view of an unseen spirit. It creates a feeling of the family's tranquil life being intruded upon. Once the paranormal activity escalates, the camera movements becoming faster and sharper, placing the viewer right in the middle of the terror the family is feeling.
The excellent look of the film proves that James Wan and his team have a proper grip on the mechanics of filmmaking. Specifically, the mechanics of horror filmmaking. "The Conjuring" expertly, almost clinically, deploys a number of tricks and techniques to creep the audience out. Sound is immensely important to capturing the haunted house feeling, that uncomfortable sensation that results from hearing a weird noise in the middle of the night. The sleepwalking daughter running into a cabinet is the kind of loud, repetitive sound that puts your neck hairs on end. This is expanded upon when Lorraine goes into a trance outside the house, the sound of a noise swinging overhead increasing until we finally see the dead body dangling over Ed's shoulder. We peer into the spinning mirror of a music box, the film anticipating us looking in the blurry reflection for some unsettling presence. Wan cribs from the "Saw" series' biggest rival by including some gritty, unsettlingly real looking found footage into a few sequences. It all builds towards the scariest moment in the film, when Carolyn is exploring the creepy cellar. She strikes a match to illuminate the dark, shadows all around her, the camera close on her face. The suspense escalates nicely towards a sudden burst of violence.
Honestly, "The Conjuring" is so good at utilizes familiar techniques to make a scary movie, that it almost comes across as cynical at times. The last truly effective jolt in the movie, in my opinion, is when we see the hairs on one of the girls' head float upwards, grabbed by an unseen force, before she's flung across the room in a well executed far shot. This proceeds a last act where "The Conjuring" can no longer resist the silliness at the center of its heart. After "The Amityville Horror," the other seventies shocker Wan is clearly most indebted to is "The Exorcist." The gross-out factor of projectile vomiting, a feminine but scarred up face, and a levitating object all appear. In this last act, "The Conjuring" abandons quieter chills in favor of louder, flashier techniques. There's some distracting CGI and jolting jump scares as the film moves towards a battle-between-good-and-evil climax. That feels at odds with the goals of the rest of the film, which was more about the humble comforts of home and family being disturbed by outside forces and not such grandiose notions as God and the Devil.
That presents the biggest problem with "The Conjuring," one all of the most well executed scares in the world would have trouble overcoming. It's not only that "The Conjuring" presents two "investigators" of dubious moral merit as stand-up citizens and heroes, when they were nuts at best and full-on con artists at worst in actuality. The film embraces the Warrens' beliefs without an ounce of irony or criticism. In the film's world – which is ostensibly presented as our world, given all the "based on a true story" branding – witches are real and they are evil. They worship Satan, who is definitely real, and sacrifice babies to him with some regularity. The script goes so far as to connect Bathsheba Sherman – again, who was an actual human being who lived and died – to the Salem Witch Trials. I thought we, as a culture, understood that no actual witches or warlocks lived in Salem, given the meaning the term "witch hunt" has taken on? Nevertheless, "The Conjuring" hinges on the idea that demonic spirits exist and that they make humans do horrible things, to mock God and weaken our collective integrity. Within this moral framework, the Catholic Church is presented as the ultimate force of good. The climax revolves around Ed performing an exorcism after the Vatican drags its feet in approving such a ritual. God is what opposes the forces of evil and the Catholic Church, and all its doctrine and members, are presented as his agents on Earth.
It is, to say the least, somewhat irresponsible for a major Hollywood production to take such a stance. Here in reality, organized networks of Satanists conspiring to traffic and abuse children exist strictly within the realm of urban legends and the paranoid fantasies of right-wing reactionaries. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, doesn't exactly have the best record on protecting the welfare of children. Ya know, horror movies have been embracing the tenets of the Satanic Panic, without much subversion or criticism, for decades. Such plot points residing within films from the seventies and eighties is at least understandable. That was a less informed time, before the internet made the totality of all human knowledge accessible to anyone at any time. Despite that, horror films like this and the "Paranormal Activity" sequels, that pushed fear-mongering delusions about evil Satanists operating in the shadows, flourished in the 2010s. Looking back twelve years later, after PizzaGate and QAnon became full-blown cultural movements, when nonsensical conspiracy theories about devil worshipers have flourished and become pathways to all manner of dangerous misinformation, when a widespread shift in the national mood towards paranoia and fear over any one that is "different" is evident, it's hard to think of "The Conjuring" as merely a harmless horror movie.
I don't think James Wan is a MAGA bro or an evangelical Christian extremist. I don't think he intentionally inserted a right-wing agenda into his spooky scary ghost movie, as part of some culture war shenanigans. If anything, I think "The Conjuring" was simply an act of franchise engineering on the director and his production team's behalf. The film presents the Warrens as superheroic figures, Lorraine's second sight acting as a power of sorts. Bathsheba is our villain with a catchy name. The museum full of other cursed artifacts presents countless openings for stories, past and future. "The Conjuring" concludes with a scene teasing the Warrens' most famous adventure, very much within the Marvel Cinematic Universe style. The superhero-ification of Ed and Lorraine means buying in completely to the insane bullshit they preach, a probably unintentional alignment with the revival of the worst parts of the Satanic Panic.
If you can look past all of that, "The Conjuring" is a fine horror movie. The stars are endearing. Wan is operating at maximum strength as an engineer of creepy moments and full-speed thrills. It pays extensive homage to the genre's past while operating as a decent film in its own right. Really, if it was about some made-up ghost hunters, I would almost assuredly like it a lot more. Aligning itself with real world hucksters, and never pausing once to consider if maybe some of these beliefs are silly or even dangerous, keeps me from enjoying the film as the blockbuster horror entertainment that it is clearly meant to be. The mob has long since spoken, "The Conjuring" already having etched a place for itself in the pantheon of modern horror classics though. For better or worse. [Grade: B]