"The Conjuring" is a horror film. I'll open with these few words and wait for everyone to make up their minds as to how good they think the movie is.
Done? If you have any sense, you concluded it's another horror flick released in a time when horror flicks are at their most ineffective and carries a bad, generic title, probably favored over other eye-catchers such as "The Haunting", "The Calling" or "We're totally making another exorcism movie".
I went into this film, at the request of my girlfriend alone, expecting the usual cavalcade of jump-scares and loud music stings, with a terrible plot to boot.
Imagine how surprised I was when the movie ended and I realized, it was actually quite good.
The Conjuring is a classic haunting story. When the Perrons, a typical American family of five discover that their new house is haunted and strange occurrences start threatening their safety, they contact real-life "paranormal investigators" Ed and Lorrain Warren for help.
The story is supposedly based on "real-life events" and if that's a selling point to you then great, but it's a marketing blurb that always made me uneasy. Saying "based on" or "inspired by real-life events" is essentially the ticket for sub-par writers to justify the drivel they just shat out in the name of a quick-buck by (voluntarily) gullible audiences.
I find the blurb especially troubling in paranormal flicks, because by default the "true events" are only selectively true. They're not chronicled anywhere, they're not historic events, they are the personal accounts of people who claim to have been involved and for all the rest of us rational people know, they are blowing smoke.
Ed and Lorraine Warren are real paranormal investigators with decades long of action in the field, with Lorrain additionally claiming she's a clairvoyant of sorts and can sense and see the dead. They were best-known for "solving" the case of the Amityville haunting (also turned into a movie in 1979). Ed passed in 2006 and Lorrain hasn't been active for a while-- she's after all 86 years old!
The problem is that not just for skeptics, but also according to far too many folks into that supernatural sort of thing, the couple are considered nothing but a very-publicized pair of crooks.
Earlier when I said horror films are at their most ineffective now I was merely being factitious. The truth is they went through their roughest stage in the previous decade with all the TV starlets clogging up third-rate slasher movies (e.g. the "House of Wax" remake) and that torture-porn bullshit. Now they're in their recovering stage, which means that every now and then the genre can claim a modest win.
I'm generally unimpressed by them, however, as the genre as a whole rarely holds interest to me. I'm a gamer and no matter how you spin it, well-done interactive horror is always going to trump your local amusement park's scary Funhouse.
Still, movies like The Conjuring or the Evil Dead remake (for entirely different reasons) at the very least amuse me, if they treat their subject material with the necessarily directorial respect and more importantly, if they know how to pace themselves.
The plot of The Conjuring is bare-bones-basic. There is no twist, there is no mystery, the whole thing is fairly straight-forward from the first minute. It also doesn't seem to trouble itself with character development and drama and what little is there is actually focused on Ed and Lorraine, not the Perrons. If anything, the Perrons are just the pawns in the huge board-game that is the haunted house.
It's a hit or miss approach, not because the focus is on them or that it's little, but because it exists at all. The Warrens just don't come off as particularly interesting and in fact their quiet scenes are jarring when put next to the rest of the film's tone and pacing. There is also a distraction involving the doll from the poster, a conduit the demon of the story briefly uses to threaten their daughter, but the whole segment just doesn't gel with the rest of the film. I can only believe it was put in for reasons of "authenticity" based on Lorrain's account of the incident.
But you know what? I can dig the approach. A lesson I recently remembered with Evil Dead is that while character development is good to help the audience connect and sympathize with the heroes when shit hits the fan, sometimes the atmosphere and the spectacle alone are enough.
Additionally, if done well, it can be a blessing in disguise as it may create the delusion to the audience that the story's protagonists are interchangeable with them and they can find themselves in that same perilous position, increasing the all-too-important immersion, especially for a horror story. The Perrons are, for all intends and purposes, a typical American family like any other and they are entirely helpless without the aid of the "professional ghost-busters".
How well all of this works depends largely on the skill of your director and fortunately The Conjuring's James Wan (co-creator and director of SAW, of all things) knows how to stage horror.
He takes his time to build tension and escalate the scares until the climax of the movie. The early scares aren't particularly terrifying, but they are spooky and force the audience into a cautious mindset. When finally the time comes to unleash the truly terrifying imagery, almost all of them are effective, because of the tension that has infected the viewer.
For the first half of the film, the evil that haunts the Perrons is entirely invisible and throughout the entire story, we never see a face. The closest we ever get of a form in the entire story is via its victims, who also serve to provide clues for the plot; an excellent trick, as these other ghosts make cameos and exist as echoes in the haunted house, essentially foretelling the Perrons' fate if Ed and Warren are unsuccessful.
The established jump-scares and loud music-stings are par for the course, but Wan at the very least makes his damned best to make them as unpredictable as possible and build them up properly, offering the maximum scare effect.
It's not perfect. The simplicity of the plot is sometimes used as a crutch to completely ignore it in favour of building tension and as such the story can become inexplicably hard to follow. The cast is great through-and-through, but they are underutilized as the material doesn't call for range and they all seem to exist just to shit their pants.
Also, the film lost me completely in the third act and specifically in its climax, which involves -what else- an exorcism. All the tension at that point is gone, there are no scares and all of it is replaced by your standard special effects and screaming and lots of chanting in Latin and Christian superstition for effect.
The verdict is that The Conjuring is good. It's not necessarily the horror experience you've been waiting for, but it's solid. It's tense, it's spooky, it's well-acted and it's effective. I had reason to hate this film through and through, from the title and generic plot, to the resolution being a proper church-approved exorcism and the story being based on the Warrens' accounts who I never thought of as trustworthy. But for all the ingredients that I found shaky at best, the execution is very good and makes for a very enjoyable scary experience. Recommended.
I went into this film, at the request of my girlfriend alone, expecting the usual cavalcade of jump-scares and loud music stings, with a terrible plot to boot.
Imagine how surprised I was when the movie ended and I realized, it was actually quite good.
The Conjuring is a classic haunting story. When the Perrons, a typical American family of five discover that their new house is haunted and strange occurrences start threatening their safety, they contact real-life "paranormal investigators" Ed and Lorrain Warren for help.
The story is supposedly based on "real-life events" and if that's a selling point to you then great, but it's a marketing blurb that always made me uneasy. Saying "based on" or "inspired by real-life events" is essentially the ticket for sub-par writers to justify the drivel they just shat out in the name of a quick-buck by (voluntarily) gullible audiences.
I find the blurb especially troubling in paranormal flicks, because by default the "true events" are only selectively true. They're not chronicled anywhere, they're not historic events, they are the personal accounts of people who claim to have been involved and for all the rest of us rational people know, they are blowing smoke.
Ed and Lorraine Warren are real paranormal investigators with decades long of action in the field, with Lorrain additionally claiming she's a clairvoyant of sorts and can sense and see the dead. They were best-known for "solving" the case of the Amityville haunting (also turned into a movie in 1979). Ed passed in 2006 and Lorrain hasn't been active for a while-- she's after all 86 years old!
The problem is that not just for skeptics, but also according to far too many folks into that supernatural sort of thing, the couple are considered nothing but a very-publicized pair of crooks.
Earlier when I said horror films are at their most ineffective now I was merely being factitious. The truth is they went through their roughest stage in the previous decade with all the TV starlets clogging up third-rate slasher movies (e.g. the "House of Wax" remake) and that torture-porn bullshit. Now they're in their recovering stage, which means that every now and then the genre can claim a modest win.
I'm generally unimpressed by them, however, as the genre as a whole rarely holds interest to me. I'm a gamer and no matter how you spin it, well-done interactive horror is always going to trump your local amusement park's scary Funhouse.
 |
| Patrick Wilson as Ed Warren with the film's scariest prop. It's still not even near the scariest scene. |
Still, movies like The Conjuring or the Evil Dead remake (for entirely different reasons) at the very least amuse me, if they treat their subject material with the necessarily directorial respect and more importantly, if they know how to pace themselves.
The plot of The Conjuring is bare-bones-basic. There is no twist, there is no mystery, the whole thing is fairly straight-forward from the first minute. It also doesn't seem to trouble itself with character development and drama and what little is there is actually focused on Ed and Lorraine, not the Perrons. If anything, the Perrons are just the pawns in the huge board-game that is the haunted house.
It's a hit or miss approach, not because the focus is on them or that it's little, but because it exists at all. The Warrens just don't come off as particularly interesting and in fact their quiet scenes are jarring when put next to the rest of the film's tone and pacing. There is also a distraction involving the doll from the poster, a conduit the demon of the story briefly uses to threaten their daughter, but the whole segment just doesn't gel with the rest of the film. I can only believe it was put in for reasons of "authenticity" based on Lorrain's account of the incident.
But you know what? I can dig the approach. A lesson I recently remembered with Evil Dead is that while character development is good to help the audience connect and sympathize with the heroes when shit hits the fan, sometimes the atmosphere and the spectacle alone are enough.
Additionally, if done well, it can be a blessing in disguise as it may create the delusion to the audience that the story's protagonists are interchangeable with them and they can find themselves in that same perilous position, increasing the all-too-important immersion, especially for a horror story. The Perrons are, for all intends and purposes, a typical American family like any other and they are entirely helpless without the aid of the "professional ghost-busters".
 |
| Not once do we see what has the kid in tears. Not once does it matter. |
How well all of this works depends largely on the skill of your director and fortunately The Conjuring's James Wan (co-creator and director of SAW, of all things) knows how to stage horror.
He takes his time to build tension and escalate the scares until the climax of the movie. The early scares aren't particularly terrifying, but they are spooky and force the audience into a cautious mindset. When finally the time comes to unleash the truly terrifying imagery, almost all of them are effective, because of the tension that has infected the viewer.
For the first half of the film, the evil that haunts the Perrons is entirely invisible and throughout the entire story, we never see a face. The closest we ever get of a form in the entire story is via its victims, who also serve to provide clues for the plot; an excellent trick, as these other ghosts make cameos and exist as echoes in the haunted house, essentially foretelling the Perrons' fate if Ed and Warren are unsuccessful.
The established jump-scares and loud music-stings are par for the course, but Wan at the very least makes his damned best to make them as unpredictable as possible and build them up properly, offering the maximum scare effect.
It's not perfect. The simplicity of the plot is sometimes used as a crutch to completely ignore it in favour of building tension and as such the story can become inexplicably hard to follow. The cast is great through-and-through, but they are underutilized as the material doesn't call for range and they all seem to exist just to shit their pants.
Also, the film lost me completely in the third act and specifically in its climax, which involves -what else- an exorcism. All the tension at that point is gone, there are no scares and all of it is replaced by your standard special effects and screaming and lots of chanting in Latin and Christian superstition for effect.
The verdict is that The Conjuring is good. It's not necessarily the horror experience you've been waiting for, but it's solid. It's tense, it's spooky, it's well-acted and it's effective. I had reason to hate this film through and through, from the title and generic plot, to the resolution being a proper church-approved exorcism and the story being based on the Warrens' accounts who I never thought of as trustworthy. But for all the ingredients that I found shaky at best, the execution is very good and makes for a very enjoyable scary experience. Recommended.
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