The Conjuring is James Wan working hard to fine tune his the horror genre output. The man who brought us Saw (2004), Dead Silence (2007); and Insidious (2010) is learning how to scare more effectively. He is trying rely less upon gore to make his audience swoon with terror.
Insidious, for all its opening promise is a film that contained an effective “jump scare” in the first five minutes. Sadly, it ultimately lost its punch three-quarters of the way through the film. It was brilliantly scary right up until it decided to morph into the 1982 film Poltergeist. But the film was an improvement on his two other forays into the genre.
Saw, was unique – the first one was anyway – and it did go outside the box quite adroitly. It then became a gore entrenched franchise that lost a little something with each revisit to the verse. Dead Silence could have been brilliant, but wasn’t. I personally had no ability to connect with the protagonist. Plus the whole premise had been done better in Korea with the excellent film The Doll Master.
James Wan and great casting
The Conjuring is James Wan giving us one hell of a scary movie.
His latest offering in the horror stakes was a real tour de force of creepy, scary, popcorn losing horror. Wan brings you into the state of dread and jumpy fear slowly. Building up the feelings we have for the real life couple Ed and Lorraine Warren.
I’ve seen them both in filmed interviews when Ed was still alive . They both struck me as caring and nice people. Wan’s casting of Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson was a stroke of genius.
The actors exude the same kind of warmth and inner confidence that the real Ed and Lorraine seemed to have. Every actor worked well in The Conjuring. An added bonus was seeing The Haunting’s Lili Taylor back in the genre again.
The story
The story of the Perron family is a true one. Just one of many that the fascinating Warren couple investigated in their role as “ghost busters.” Sadly for them, they got involved in the mess that was Amityville. The resultant bad publicity that incident generated took away from their early credibility.
Credibility
Wan manages to make us care about both the Warren’s and the Perron’s. We feel real dread at the evil presence in the house in Long Island. Also a feel of tangible fear in Ed Warren’s room of artifacts. The doll Annabelle; also from a real case, exudes a palpable menace . So much so that I felt it was going to show up later. Appearing like a malefic jack in the box in the possessed Perron house. a la Chucky and start stabbing everyone to death.
I finally got to see the film in the cinema. I was four seats away from the most intrusive couple I’ve ever had the displeasure of watching a film with. She was, apparently, not all there and he was, again apparently, drunk. They spent the entire film loudly whispering to each other. All about events on the screen that they either didn’t understand or had missed. I was ready to throttle the two of them ten minutes into the film.
It works
Even their constant babbling during the film did not mar the suspense and fear. It also did nothing to lessen the popcorn tossing from my part of the cinema. I must have jerked so many times that the bolts of my seat had to have been loosened. Wan’s effective use of sound had me cranked up and ready to kangaroo jump out of my seat repeatedly.
The look of the film was brilliant. The textures, the colours, the lighting of the film were all spot on. All worked together with the actors to sell this scary as hell horror film. Wan hones his very evident fine tuning of the horror genre here.
He manages a lot of scares per minute in The Conjuring. I am eagerly looking forward to Insidious 2, despite the Tiny Tim music.
the verdict
This is a real 5 out of 5 stars. It is a very scary film. The Conjuring is currently streaming on Max.
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