ANNABELLE: CREATION

OUT 11 August / CERT 15 / 109 mins director David F. Sandberg cast Stephanie Sigman, Anthony Lapaglia, Mirando Otto, Talitha Bateman THE LATEST ENTRY in what is fast becoming more scared universe than shared universe,

Annabelle: Creation is a prequel to a prequel (a preprequel?), telling the tale of how creepy demon doll Annabelle, first glimpsed in The

Conjuring, came to be. By this point, you’d expect the law of diminishing returns to have kicked in, but director David F. Sandberg, coming on leaps and bounds from Lights

Out, skilfully sets up and delivers plenty of scares. The plot, which sees a group of orphaned children go to live with Anthony Lapaglia’s mysterious toymaker and his disfigured wife (Otto), perhaps has too many characters to track, and there’s an over-reliance on loud noises, but this is a solid and at times surprising horror. ch