All dolled up

ANNABELLE: CREATION I Lights Out director reanimates the Conjuring spin-off…

Let’s just address the creepy doll in the room: 2014’s Annabelle wasn’t very good. “It didn’t live up to The Conjuring. Not a lot of horror movies do!” agrees director David F. Sandberg, who chilled marrows last year with switched-on shocker Lights Out. So why sign on to a prequel? “I felt I could make it my own,” he explains. “It’s not just the typical horror sequel where it’s the first movie one more time.”

Quite the opposite because, whisper it, his period prequel is a little bit good. Delving into the history of the doll that had Annabelle Wallis screaming in the original, Annabelle: Creation winds back the clock for a film set before anything else so far. “It’s the earliest movie in the universe, which was kind of fun,” he grins. “There was a little bit of a disappointment with the first film, but I think we started out in a good place where there was a chance we could do something that improved on it.”

Set in the 1950s, Creation sees a group of orphaned girls taken in to the remote home of dollmaker Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia) and his wife Esther (Miranda Otto). Young Janice (Talitha Bateman) has a disability that means she finds it difficult to walk (cue the creepiest stairlift seen since Gremlins), a bit of a problem when things start going bump in the night.

Shooting over just 32 days, Sandberg built the interior of the Mullins house on a sound stage. “As much as possible I want to do it practical,” he explains of his old-school approach. “I’m a big kid

like that. There’s a scene where half a person is crawling across the floor. We found this woman who was an amputee, so that’s in-camera stuff.”

Then, of course, there’s the doll… “When Annabelle starts to appear, it’s almost like, ‘Frankenstein, you created this monster,’” says LaPaglia. “There’s certain lighting where, honestly, you think the eyes are following you,” he shivers. You’ve been warned…