The Conjuring (Movie Summary and Review)

(2013) 1h 52min

The Conjuring opens in the apartment of two young nurses who are telling Ed and Lorraine Warren their story. Tearfully, they explain how they'd invited the spirit of a lonely little girl to inhabit a doll. "You did what? It was a big mistake acknowledging this doll," scolds Ed Warren. Lorraine Warren explains there was never any little girl ghost named Annabelle, but rather a diabolical non-human entity. "Demonic spirits don't possess things," Lorraine tells the women. "They possess people. It wanted to get inside of you." Sound of film projector clacking, a film ends, the action pulls back, lights come up—the Warrens have been relating this demon doll story to an auditorium audience.

Backing into a story this way, by having someone relate it to an audience after it's already happened to someone else, is an excellent device for horror, because we subconsciously make a decision about our level of buy-in whenever events are told second-hand. The auditorium scene is a neat twist on the device generally ascribed to Henry James and The Turn of the Screw. Purely from a story structure point of view, all we really know for certain is what the terrified nurses told the Warrens, and what the Warrens told their lecture audience—and some of them are laughing. The Warrens take questions. Someone asks, "What do people call you?" The Warrens look resigned and admit that "kooks" and "wackos" is something people call them, but they prefer demonologists.This intro also assures mischief managed: the doll is no longer a threat and has been hidden "someplace safe." So The Conjuring begins with the Annabelle story, for the moment, over...?

"Oh God, We're In The Middle of Nowhere"

The main action of The Conjuring begins at a large ramshackle house in Rhode Island, with the Perrons, a congenial blue collar family who are relocating from New Jersey because 1971 was so weird. Yes, of course a snotty teenager is mad about the move—as if you even need to ask? Then one daughter finds a creepy antique toy and talks to an invisible playmate, then another daughter is a sleepwalker...haunted! The house is haunted. And because there are so many children, the movie almost rents itself out as a biggest-hits-of-haunting anthology. Even aside from the events that happen to each of these children, there's a metric ton of trope here. In no particular order:

• Dog whines and refuses to come inside the house.
• Dad breaks into a sealed-up door to a hidden basement.
• Mom's body shows mysterious marks and bruises. 
• Clocks all stop at the same time every night.
• It's always cold no matter how high the heat is turned up (make a point that it's not the furnace).
• Something smells bad.
• Sheets are suddenly yanked off the bed while people sleep.
• Pictures fall off the wall.
• A music box.
• An antique wardrobe.
• Doors creak open.
• Doors slam shut
• A devoted mother becomes terrified that something horrible is happening in the house and she gets Ed and Lorraine Warren to come over and purge the demon before it's too late.
• The end...?

How come always the dog. Come on, man.

*It's About Family, Grandpa!

A pause here to talk about a major theme of The Conjuring. "Family" is the fraught centerpiece of this particular haunting, and this theme reverberates from the world of the living (the Warren and Perron families) to the realm of the dead (ghosts) and non-living (demonic spirits). In the world since the Amityville Horror (not the movie, I mean the real-world tale from the original Warren files) we know Lorraine Warren as clairvoyant, and we know her as demon-vanquisher, but we've never seen Lorraine Warren as a mother. Here, Lorraine helps a fraught Carolyn to escape the wrath of dark spirits hell bent on possessing Carolyn and turning her from loving mom to murderous madwoman. Two families, that means two devoted mothers who become terrified that something horrible is happening in her house, and one of them is Lorraine Warren, well-played here by Vera Farmiga. And doesn't the other mother just happen to be perpetually-haunted Lily Taylor as Carolyn Perron.

*I am poking nerdy fun. "It's about family, grandpa!" is an unforgivably corny haunted-Lily Taylor line from another movie entirely, The Haunted. I couldn't resist using it here, because...Lily Taylor!


Fast-Forward This Review

Tell you what. I'm sure there's loads of super-detailed reviews penned by stronger souls than mine, and any number of scene-by-scene video essays to provide you with the full-tilt-boogie effect of following The Conjuring story lines as concurrent, past and future events unfold, merge and play out through to the end of this chapter, for "chapter" it is! Because behold! The Conjuring is a franchise, and it's growing fast, so it looks like **we'll have this thing around for as long as we've had The Amityville Horror, with loads of prequels, sequels, and spins-off.

**Generation X knows no world without 112 Ocean Ave.

All told, yes, I like The Conjuring, despite its super-dense plot...it's a lotta threads all in one span of 112 minutes. I even like every single one of its movie cliches, from the demon toy to the furnace that won't heat the house. Because I'm not sure these are flaws or "movie sins." Instead, I offer up an alternative way to look at it, having to do with the legend of Ed and Lorraine Warren. 

The Warren Effect

Okay, I'd heard The Conjuring described as the most chilling movie since The Exorcist, that's one reason I put it on the list this month. The other reason is that I'm an easy sell on any Ed and Lorraine Warren story however heavily fictionalized. I'm from Connecticut. The Warrens were like, a whole thing. They're legendary. Their case files have been used as source material for loads of books and movies, most famously The Amityville Horror. Still, I'm kind of a hard sell on forsaking plot for scares, that is to say, when "story" falls apart the minute you stop watching through your fingers, and this Conjuring story seems incredibly dense. There's more than one thing doing the haunting. There's a witch, there's a demon, some ghosts...and what about that doll?! My initial reaction was that the whole movie churns to the point where it's distracting to keep track of which witch, what demon, who is this ghost, is that a ghost or what IS it, and wasn't there something about a doll in the beginning...? That's my initial reaction until I remind myself that, actually the franchise aspect means that of course there will be un-answered questions. In a franchise, they can close those loops in the next movie, or in the one after that. 

• Why does Lorraine tell the young nurses that spirits don't possess things, when she's got a huge storeroom in her house with a lot of possessed things in it?

• If those nurses said the doll was moving all around their apartment, even came back once after they tried throwing it in the trash, how come Ed thinks it's "safe" in a glass display case in a locked room that his daughter seems to sneak into any time she feels like it?

• If Ed views his primary role as debunking (finding a logical explanation for) weird goings-on, why does he start right out telling the Perrons such terrifying things the minute he steps into their house before he even entertains any logical explanations first?

Call me hardcore, but to me a good story still means sequential events that unfold in relation to each other, no matter how many Warrens come along to exorcise however-many demons from however-many haunted toys. When I say "it's a lotta threads all in one span of 112 minutes," I must add that as a viewer I expended actual energy trying not to be distracted by "but what about that whole demon doll thing?" from the opening scene. Waiting for something to loop the doll into the main action in the Perron household is the wrong kind of "suspense." Well, what if the viewing audience is meant to doubt the Warrens, and to question the facts of their cases, and to worry about the strength of that lock on that storage room where they keep Annabelle and all the other collected haunted and cursed talismans, conduits and vessels. That's the right kind of suspense.

Trope-a-Dope

As for the "movie sin"  where every horror cliche is represented here like a collected anthology, how about another way to look at it? What if The Conjuring asks the viewing audience to suspend our cumulative knowledge of the past 40 years of movie-making and climb inside the 1971-era Warren universe, which means all those movie events aren't cliche yet at all? In the world where these events take place, one might attend a lecture given by Ed and Lorraine Warren who nobody has heard of yet. The scenes of their lectures (those really happened, by the way) might serve as annotations meant for us, the viewing audience. Notice no one is raising their hand to say "Oh, the old 'speaking in tongue's routine, sure." They ask "What do people call you?" What the Warrens present is new to their in-movie 1971 auditorium audience, if not to us, the modern movie-viewing audience. We see these things as movie cliche, where a demon latches onto a little girl, beds shake, possessed people speak in languages they haven't learned. It's at one of the lectures where Carolyn Perron tracks down Ed and Lorraine, begging them to come to Rhode Island and help figure out what's happening in her house. The lectures do something else, too. The content is relevant not only to the current case (the Perron house) but to the next case after that. The Lutz family doesn't move to 112 Ocean Avenue until 1974, you guys. One might suggest that not only does The Conjuring launch its own canon with sequels, prequels and spins-off, but that it's a prequel itself, next stop Amityville, Long Island. These Conjuring franchise people are definitely going to do their own version of Amityville Horror, and that works for me. 👻 

Dear Reader,

I'm always curious to find out 

who reads my blog before seeing the movie, 

and who likes to watch the movie 

and then come read what I wrote. 

If you would be so kind, please leave a comment. 

Yours, 

@SuperLowBudge

Related: We Lived In A Haunted House