The Conjuring - 2013
This is one of the best horror films I have EVER seen, and I’m not exaggerating in the least. I’ve spent the better part of a week shaking my head and wondering how it took me THIS long to discover it. It feels like I need to do some kind of penance for my gross neglect. Now, I’ll try to briefly right my wrongs and pay it proper homage.
“They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” is a phrase oft-repeated and even more often true. But not in this case. The Conjuring is not worse than the ones that have gone before it. In fact, it just might be the culmination of them all.
On the surface, critics could rightly deride The Conjuring for “not doing anything new.” But there’s a piece that they are missing. What it does so well is to smash together the films of decades past into its own new masterpiece. Put differently, this film is a hodgepodge, an amalgam of famed constituent parts. It meshes the haunted house tale trappings of Amityville Horror to the demonic possession fables which found their height in The Exorcist. Then, in key moments “down the stretch,” it even brings in modern horror storytelling a la found footage. See, it’s the climactic feat of 50 years of horror, and in that way alone, it is wholly NEW.
Enough with this argument. Let me change tacks. The director, James Wan, is just great at this type of filmmaking. He moves the camera so well, blocks shots to set up scares, and punctuates it all with a dynamic score. Moreover, this picture actually has A-list actors and interesting characters. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson have been in our lives for nearly a decade now as the indomitable Ed and Lorraine Warren, a couple who somehow manage to be devout, sweetly loving, and tenacious in their quests inside a horror franchise! (We could add notes of detective adventures to the admixture mentioned above). Here they are joined by Lili Taylor, in a tour-de-force performance. But it’s not the actors alone. They are located inside a fabulous haunted house yarn of witches and suicides and cursed lands which feels inhabited and oddly believable.
One more thing deserves special mention. The Conjuring is scary as hell! It seems like an odd thing to say about a horror picture these days, but so many just AREN'T anymore. Or they force feed you terror by shock tactics or sheer visual bludgeoning (Wan does a little of that elsewhere, to be fair). Here, the story, the background, the characters and performances all set up the tension that the demon spikes home.
So, I return to the top. It’s simply one of the best in my eyes. Not even Ron Livingston’s preposterous mop can derail this masterpiece. The Conjuring was the vehicle that launched an entire franchise which consists of films that are (mostly) solid in their own right. Their continued success speaks all the more to the fabulous foundation built inside the original Perron household.
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