The Conjuring
It’s a remix of every horror film made
There are some effective scenes, but it’s like a combination of every horror movie ever made, and the shocks wear thin.
Possessed bodies skitter across the floor, monsters suddenly appear in dark bedrooms, a lost little boy is reflected in the mirror of an antique jack-in-thebox, birds mysteriously crash against the side of the house, there are strange thumps in the basement ... This is The Conjuring, not just a horror film but every horror film: it’s like a reunion of tropes, and while some of them can scare the heck out of you, there’s also the uneasy feeling that we’ve had this heck scared out of us before.
The Conjuring settles for trying to scare it back into you.
It’s supposedly based on a true story, taken from the experiences of the Warrens: Lorraine (Vera Farmiga), a talented clairvoyant, and her husband Ed (Patrick Wilson), a ghost-hunter, if not an actual ghostbuster, who is also the only non-ordained Demonologist to be sanctioned by the church. The Conjuring tells the story of the case they never wrote about, an especially demonic — and especially crowded — story of possession, bird deaths, knocking, and whatnot. It happened in 1971 to the Perron family: Carolyn (Lili Taylor), her husband Roger (Ron Livingston) and their five daughters, each of whom gets a moment in the sun, as it were, as they are variously dragged from their beds by invisible hands, visited by monstrous apparitions or forced to bang their heads against the side of a wardrobe.
The Perrons have brought a house in the countryside of Rhode Island, one of those haunted-looking places that they apparently didn’t check out very well. It becomes apparent that something is wrong. The family dog won’t go inside, and pretty soon he’s in no shape to go anywhere; mom wakes up with strange bruises; clocks that all stop at 3:07 a.m., the birds keep dying. The family can’t leave because, as someone explains, the demons attach themselves to you like gum to your shoe. By the time the Perrons contact the Warrens to come over and take a look, we’re in the throes of a full-blown homage to Poltergeist, The Exorcist and even Insidious, the 2010 film made by director James Wan.
Wan — who made his reputation with the first Saw movie — has a real understanding of the genre, and much of The Conjuring is well done. He’s a master of the slow buildup and gloomy lighting, and the movie gets its shivers from its mood of impending terror rather than just the shock of surprise of lesser horror movies.
It also benefits from good performances from Taylor, as a mother trapped in the spirit of an ancient witch — the Salem trials have been a constant gift to American filmmakers — and especially Farmiga as a woman who sees more than she wants to.
It shakes you, but it never really gets under your skin, mostly because we’re so familiar with what it is doing. At one stage, the Warrens show off a room in their house that is furnished with all the possessed artifacts they’ve found in their long career of chasing devilry, and among them is that toy monkey with cymbals that everyone used to put into their films to creep us out.
The monkey just has a cameo: the scary toy here is a doll named Annabelle. It’s an awful looking thing, probably worthy of a movie of its own.
But that was Bride of Chucky, wasn’t it?