The Conjuring (15.)
Directed by James Wan.
Starring Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston. 112 mins.
When this came out in August I didn’t pay it any heed, assuming it to be just another suggestive haunting movie, all creaking floorboards and half seen shapes glimpsed in the darkness that would get a big crowd in the first week and then quickly trail away and be forgotten. Then the damn thing goes on to be not only the year’s best reviewed scary movie but also one of its biggest hits earning over $300 million worldwide.
The Conjuring is all creaking floorboards and half seen shapes glimpsed in the darkness but it is isn’t just another suggestive haunting movie: it is the complete haunted house movie, a haunted house movie with nothing left out, that includes everything. This is the big shop of horrors, and if you can’t find something you like here you had better go look around an Eli Roth film.
Filmmakers have been making things go bump in the night from the very beginning but it strikes me that the modern taste for largely bloodless, gore free chillers probably dates back to 1999 when Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense were hits. Those two films really set up templates that have been getting reworked and cross bred ever since. They can be done dirt cheap or with a bit of studio polish; they can be Paranormal Activity or The Others, but it is still the same kind of boo, made you jump effect.
In The Conjuring Wan and his screenwriters seem intent on making a scary film compendium with nowt left out. There’s a creepy boarded up cellar, sleepwalking children, demonic possession, an exorcism, paranormal researchers complete with their equipment and a haunted ventriloquist doll, which features heavily in the posters but is largely tangential to the plot. To show just how exhaustively comprehensive the film is it even includes a ghost in a white sheet and at the end there is a bit Hitchcock’s The Birds thrown in. I was waiting for the meta-scare when the poltergeist rips the kitchen sink out of the wall and throws it at the terrified family.
It doesn’t offer anything new but it is fantastically well executed. Wan, whose first movie was Saw, had a practise run for this with the very similar Insidious (made in 2010) and having sharpened his skills he executes all the shop-worn tricks here with considerable skill. The compositions and perspectives are always spot on. If you are at all susceptible to these things, the film gets you in its grip right from the off with a prelude featuring the ventriloquist doll, and probably won’t let you loose till it ends. The film is in a rush to get through its array of tricks and scares; it give itself just enough lull time between each set up to calm its audience down before springing its next shock on them.
The bulk of film centres on the Perron family (Taylor, Livingston and five daughters) moving into their new home in the forest in 1971. Once they discover the full extent of how haunted their new home is they call in two paranormal investigators Lorraine (Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Wilson), who are the Mulder and Scully of ghost hunters. (Farmiga looks and sounds uncannily similar to Gillian Anderson.) What is admirable about The Conjuring is that it has some genuine feeling for its characters; what is less so is that it is a heavy duty religious tract.
In Insidious, Wan told what was basically an exorcism story but put in a neutral science fantasy context. There were demons but they were just presented as creatures from another dimension. The Conjuring though is definitely a Christian tale. Early on Mr Perron says that his is “not really a churchgoing family,” and they are made to suffer for it. The film emphasises its Based On A True Story credentials and treats it theology very respectfully. William Peter Blatty said he wrote The Exorcist to try and convert people to Catholicism; I suspect that in The Conjuring all the Catholicism is just there in the hope that it will ramp up the intensity of the audience response to the thrills, though it is possible that the creator of Saw has found Jesus.
Whatever the truth I have to question the morality of a film that terrorises a family of five young girls for our entertainment and then finds that that isn’t quite enough so drafts in another young girl, the Warren’s daughter, to get traumatised as well.
The disc extras are three short featurettes, all interview heavy – one on the real life family, one on the Warrens and a making of.
Directed by James Wan.
Starring Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston. 112 mins.
When this came out in August I didn’t pay it any heed, assuming it to be just another suggestive haunting movie, all creaking floorboards and half seen shapes glimpsed in the darkness that would get a big crowd in the first week and then quickly trail away and be forgotten. Then the damn thing goes on to be not only the year’s best reviewed scary movie but also one of its biggest hits earning over $300 million worldwide.
The Conjuring is all creaking floorboards and half seen shapes glimpsed in the darkness but it is isn’t just another suggestive haunting movie: it is the complete haunted house movie, a haunted house movie with nothing left out, that includes everything. This is the big shop of horrors, and if you can’t find something you like here you had better go look around an Eli Roth film.
Filmmakers have been making things go bump in the night from the very beginning but it strikes me that the modern taste for largely bloodless, gore free chillers probably dates back to 1999 when Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense were hits. Those two films really set up templates that have been getting reworked and cross bred ever since. They can be done dirt cheap or with a bit of studio polish; they can be Paranormal Activity or The Others, but it is still the same kind of boo, made you jump effect.
In The Conjuring Wan and his screenwriters seem intent on making a scary film compendium with nowt left out. There’s a creepy boarded up cellar, sleepwalking children, demonic possession, an exorcism, paranormal researchers complete with their equipment and a haunted ventriloquist doll, which features heavily in the posters but is largely tangential to the plot. To show just how exhaustively comprehensive the film is it even includes a ghost in a white sheet and at the end there is a bit Hitchcock’s The Birds thrown in. I was waiting for the meta-scare when the poltergeist rips the kitchen sink out of the wall and throws it at the terrified family.
It doesn’t offer anything new but it is fantastically well executed. Wan, whose first movie was Saw, had a practise run for this with the very similar Insidious (made in 2010) and having sharpened his skills he executes all the shop-worn tricks here with considerable skill. The compositions and perspectives are always spot on. If you are at all susceptible to these things, the film gets you in its grip right from the off with a prelude featuring the ventriloquist doll, and probably won’t let you loose till it ends. The film is in a rush to get through its array of tricks and scares; it give itself just enough lull time between each set up to calm its audience down before springing its next shock on them.
The bulk of film centres on the Perron family (Taylor, Livingston and five daughters) moving into their new home in the forest in 1971. Once they discover the full extent of how haunted their new home is they call in two paranormal investigators Lorraine (Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Wilson), who are the Mulder and Scully of ghost hunters. (Farmiga looks and sounds uncannily similar to Gillian Anderson.) What is admirable about The Conjuring is that it has some genuine feeling for its characters; what is less so is that it is a heavy duty religious tract.
In Insidious, Wan told what was basically an exorcism story but put in a neutral science fantasy context. There were demons but they were just presented as creatures from another dimension. The Conjuring though is definitely a Christian tale. Early on Mr Perron says that his is “not really a churchgoing family,” and they are made to suffer for it. The film emphasises its Based On A True Story credentials and treats it theology very respectfully. William Peter Blatty said he wrote The Exorcist to try and convert people to Catholicism; I suspect that in The Conjuring all the Catholicism is just there in the hope that it will ramp up the intensity of the audience response to the thrills, though it is possible that the creator of Saw has found Jesus.
Whatever the truth I have to question the morality of a film that terrorises a family of five young girls for our entertainment and then finds that that isn’t quite enough so drafts in another young girl, the Warren’s daughter, to get traumatised as well.
The disc extras are three short featurettes, all interview heavy – one on the real life family, one on the Warrens and a making of.
