After he made the first Saw movie, which became one of the biggest and most influential hits of the last decade, James Wan could have probably kept directing Saw movies and coasting on past accomplishments until the end of time. Instead he decided to hand the franchise off to other filmmakers and keep doing original stuff though, which is pretty cool, because all the movies he makes seem to get better as he goes along. His latest, The Conjuring, is a nice mixture of the demon possession and haunted house movies that were prevalent in the 70s and 80s. Think of it as a mixture of, say, The Exorcist and Poltergeist—both in content and tone. Because if there’s one thing Wan has made clear over the course of his film career so far, it’s that he appreciates the old school way of making movies, and isn’t so interested in making things that look like everything else his contemporaries are doing.
The basic story here is inspired by a real-life pair of paranormal researchers, married couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who investigated paranormal activity over the course of a few decades starting in the 1950s, and whose exploits have inspired numerous movies, including The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Connecticut, and probably a whole heap of others. This time around we’re told that the story we’re seeing is one that’s so outrageous, so frightening, it’s been buried up until this point. Scary, right? The particulars are that a husband and wife (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) and their five daughters have just moved into a country house that they bought from a bank auction, and the bad news is that this particular house is the subject of not only a witch’s curse, but also hauntings being perpetrated on it by a whole host of restless spirits. Needless to say, things get violent, and things get scary. What else would you expect from demons and ghosts?
As was the case with Wan’s last film, Insidious, one of the main reasons The Conjuring instantly reveals itself to be head and shoulders above the usual crop of horror movies that come and go from theaters is that it employs first-rate actors instead of just settling for newcomers who are cheap because they’re just starting out in their careers. Wilson and Farmiga are always solid hands, and they make for a great team here. If this film is meant to launch a series of similar horror movies, and everything that gets released these days is, then they’re going to be the foundation future films are built on, and the limited glimpses we get of their strange home and family life, as well as the compassion they’re both able to express when they’re out on the job, prove that potential Conjuring sequels are going to be in good shape.
That doesn’t change the fact that the heart of this movie is Taylor and Livingston’s tormented parents though. They’re both doing some of the best work of their careers here, and they really sell their concern for their children, their helplessness, and their panic as things get increasingly more dangerous for them and their girls over the course of their film. It doesn’t hurt that they’re helped by strong writing either. The screenplay, credited to Chad and Carey Hayes, keeps their characters from having to act stupid in order for the plot to progress. Over the course of the film you feel that they’re taking all of the necessary steps in order to solve this problem, and that they’re doing it in a timely fashion. Never do you find yourself slapping your head and screaming at the screen, “just get out of the damned house,” which is a real rarity for films that fall into this specific genre.
One of the big mistakes many modern horrors make is not realizing that characters being terrorized is more effective the more you like and care for them. The Conjuring does a great job of not only establishing the main family of the film, and giving you glimpses of their day-to-day lives, but also showing them to be the fun-loving, hard-working sort of people who you can sympathize with. There isn’t a single random party montage to be found in this film, the characters aren’t being punished for sins they’ve committed or warnings they failed to heed, and it turns out these aren’t really tropes that are needed in the horror genre after all. As a matter of fact, horror scripts’ constant adherence to them likely ends up causing more harm than it does good.
One of the big things this film feels like it has in common with horror films from the 70s is that it isn’t afraid to build slowly, to save the crazy stuff for the end and not constantly be reaching for new ways to keep audiences on their toes through jump scares or whatnot. A horror film is fine only having one or two truly supernatural moments, so long as they’re properly built to. Theoretically, at least. Actually that’s not the case here, because by the middle of the film we’ve pretty much already gotten to the point where those old films used to end, with a full bodied apparition here and a levitation there. But after that Wan keeps raising the stakes and building the terror to levels few films manage to reach. Call that the modern twist on a classic formula, I suppose. There’s a danger to pushing things further though. Often times horror movies show too much, rely on shadows and the audience’s imaginations too little, and they end up looking more like some sort of special effects driven popcorn film than they do anything truly horrific. Wan does that once here, maybe twice. It’s enough to take you out of the movie for a minute, but not enough to sink the ship. Overall, The Conjuring is probably one of the most scare-heavy films I’ve ever seen.
And mostly that’s just because a lot of thought and craftsmanship went into the conceiving of and execution of each scene. Wan doesn’t just make the stakes of the situation clear, he consistently finds a way to raise them, and finds the most terrifying perspective you could see things play out from. It’s not enough that someone blindly explores a dark, creepy, hidden cellar, they have to do it with a book of burning matches as their only source of temporary light, instead of a flashlight. It’s not enough that a little girl disappears into a haunted, antique dresser, it then has to be reveled that she’s also disappeared down an even creepier, more haunted hole that’s been clawed into the wall behind it. A hide and seek game that the children play, where the seeker is blindfolded and forced to stumble through the house only responding to the sound of the hiders’ clapping, is especially effective in building tension to the point where you feel like that one big vein in your forehead is going to burst. The conceit makes the blindfolded party so inherently vulnerable, and once the evil spirits start getting involved in the game, well, that’s the sort of fun stuff that makes people go to horror movies in the first place.
There’s another point in the film, during an early scene where the family is moving into the house, where Wan uses a really long, single take shot to travel through the house and introduce us to each of the family members. It’s a little showy, sure, but it’s also a really effective way of introducing us to these people as well as orienting us to the geography of their house, and the time and effort it must have taken to plan and execute doesn’t go unappreciated. It’s also the sort of craftsmanship you don’t see enough of in the horror genre. Too many top-notch directors ignore scary movies, or use them as a launching point for their careers and then move on to making more “serious” things. It’s interesting to get to watch a director hone his craft while not leaving the things that go bump in the night behind. People wouldn’t scoff so much at those of us who watch horror films if they were put together by filmmakers as talented as Wan more often.
