ANNABELLE: CREATION
David F Sandberg carves his mark into the Conjuring-verse with spooky origin story Annabelle: Creation
If you have a phobia of scary dolls, you may want to look away.
Shortly after wrapping his second feature film, creepy doll prequel Annabelle: Creation, director David Sandberg and his wife took a break, travelling east of Los Angeles and renting a cabin on Lake Arrowhead. “When we got there,” Sandberg recalls, “in the bedroom they had a Raggedy Ann doll. I was like, ‘What the hell? Do these guys know I just directed this movie or do all the cabins have an Annabelle doll?’ I took pictures of it and put it on Instagram and never went into that room again!”
You can’t blame him. If anybody understands the pernicious power of inanimate objects, it’s the Swedish filmmaker. After his bulb-popping blood-curdler Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation marks Sandberg’s first studio movie and centres on a malevolent doll you never see move, but which
possesses the ability to unleash untold horror. “It’s the fact that they’re little versions of us,” Sandberg muses on why dolls are so unsettling. “It’s that uncanny valley thing where you’re almost expecting them to move. The more they look like us, the creepier they get.”
Annabelle: Creation is all about maximising that creep factor. Set before 2014’s Annabelle, itself a ’60s-set prequel to James Wan’s original The Conjuring, Sandberg’s film cranks back the clock to – as the title suggests – shed light on just how the eponymous doll came to be. Taking place in a remote California town in 1957, the prequel introduces us to Samuel (Anthony LaPaglia) and Esther Mullins (Miranda Otto) who, 12 years after a tragic event involving their daughter, have withdrawn into their rambling, isolated home.
Fans of the Conjuring franchise will likely have dim recollections of the first Annabelle, which critics flayed and fans largely forgot. Even Sandberg recalls being baffled when, during post-production on Lights Out, he was approached with the prequel. “I was like, ‘Didn’t you do everything you could with the first movie?’ Then they sent me the script by
The Mullins are trying to hide, but evil doesn’t want to be hidden
Gary Dauberman and I felt like it was a very different thing,” he recalls.
Different to the first film but also different to the visually dazzling Lights Out. With longer to shoot – more than 35 days, 10 more than on his debut – Sandberg had free rein to make Annabelle: Creation his own. While he admits that “storywise, I stuck pretty close to the script”, he did contribute “certain scares”, and he was able to fulfil a lifelong filmmaking dream by building the interior of the Mullins’s home entirely on a sound stage at Warner Bros.
“The house was so cool,” Sandberg says, his soft voice eerily reminiscent of Wes Craven. “You can define the whole place and get everything you want. Like, ‘Yeah I want the stairs to be like this, I want this room to be over here.’ It was a lot of fun making this movie.”
And while the first Annabelle suffered from a slight case of prequel-itis, Sandberg has a few surprises in store with his film. “Samuel turns out to be the dollmaker who created the Annabelle doll,” he reveals. “Something horrible happened in their past that they’re trying to hide away and forget but, of course, evil doesn’t want to be hidden away.” LaPaglia adds of the couple: “For all intents and purposes they could be the villains. I liked that there’s a fine line between playing it like you’re the villain and playing it where it could be interpreted either way.”
Attempting to resolve the riddle are orphans Janice (Talitha Bateman, sister of Lights Out’s Gabriel Bateman) and Linda (Lulu Wilson of Ouija: Origin Of Evil), who move into the Mullins’s home along with their carer, Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman), and four other girls when the couple open up their home. Just why the Mullins have suddenly become so charitable is one of the film’s mysteries, along with why Esther never leaves her bed, and is only ever glimpsed through a gossamer veil.
With echoes of Dickensian tragedy and classic single-location horror, Sandberg’s prequel is a pared-back horror that has more in common with The Conjuring then its forebear. “Because it’s a period movie, it was an excuse to go more classical with the filmmaking,” Sandberg says. “We have these longer, more choreographed takes. That’s one of the things I really love about older movies, that they took time to figure out how to shoot things!”
And, naturally, it all ties into the Conjuringverse. “There were certain things that James wanted to have in the film to tie it all together,” Sandberg says. “Like there’s a reference to the upcoming The Nun movie in there.” In other words, this is just the beginning...
Annabelle: Creation opens on 11 August.