31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring (2013)

I’ve been married for twenty-four years or so. I love my wife. I enjoy spending time with her. I enjoy watching movies with her. We share an interest in animated films and fantasy films, certain types of comedy, etc., but she has little to no interest in horror. For most of our married life, we only had one television. So, when I wanted to watch a horror film, I had to wait until she was in bed or gone somewhere without me. We now have two televisions, so I can go upstairs and watch what I want in our bedroom. But before then, it was a bit of a challenge.

Several years ago, she took our daughter to visit her parents in Kentucky. I had a lot of work going at the time, so I stayed home. For the first few days, it was a lot of fun; I felt like I was single again. But then I just missed them and counted the days down until they came home.

With nobody home, I watched a lot of horror movies. Including The Conjuring.

Obviously, I love horror. I watch a lot of it. But I got to say watching two or three horror movies a night for several nights in a row and then going to bed in an empty house proved a bit much for me. By the third night, I started freaking out a little. I’d lie there in bed, eyes wide open, jumping at every little creak or crack, knowing some monster was out to get me.

After that, I started watching comedies.

The Conjuring is a movie that’s capable of giving me nightmares, even if I hadn’t watched numerous other horror films over the course of those few days.

A lot of modern horror just throws jump scare after jump scare at you. As if all we need from a horror movie is for something to jump out at us from the darkness or for the editor to make stark cuts.

Good horror movies know how to build tension over the course of a film. They can create a mood and build on it. That’s the kind of thing that gets under your skin and stays with you long after the initial fright of a jump leaves your memory.

The Conjuring does a great job of mixing the two. It takes time to develop its characters and build its story. It creates a mood of tension and builds upon it. But it also utilizes some great jump scares. Jumps can be effective, especially if they come out of the story. Anybody can have a maniac or a monster or a cat jump out at you unexpectedly. That will generally elicit a scream. But a good jump scare has been well developed. It makes sense within the realm of the story. There is background to the scare.

The film begins with some college girls telling a story. They were dabbling in the supernatural and were talking to a spirit. They invited the spirit into a doll called Annabelle. The doll started acting up. It started to scare them. They are telling this story to Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga), two self-described demonologists who study the supernatural and help those with infestations or possessions.

From this brief scene, we understand who the Warrens are, what they do, and that within the confines of this film, the supernatural is real. Then the movie pulls out a bit, and we realize the story we’ve just been watching is actually being told to an audience at a college seminar by the Warrens. The Annabelle story is in the past; it has been solved. The Warrens use it as an example of what they do to academics and students.

Then our story shifts to Roger and Carlyn Perron (Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor) and their five daughters. They’ve just bought a big country farmhouse. We watch them move in, unpack, and play. They are a nice family. The film takes its time with them; it lets us get to know them and like them. Nothing bad happens at first.

For its first half, the film will move back and forth between the Perrons and the Warrens. The Warrens will give more talks. We’ll see them go to a possibly haunted house and determine that the spooky noises are coming from the pipes and the wind. Not every case is real, you see. The Warrens are good people, not charlatans or fakes. If your house isn’t really haunted, they’ll let you know. But if it is, they are here to help.

This has drawn quite a bit of criticism from critics because the real-life Warrens were charlatans and fakes. Their cases have been proven to be false. Their personal lives have been inspected and found severely lacking. This film and its sequels make them out to be saints. I’m not here to criticize those decisions or really to talk about the real-life people. I’m here to talk about the movie, and it’s a good one.

Slowly, weird stuff starts happening at the Perron house. There are strange noises and terrible smells. The dog refuses to come indoors. They discover a basement whose entrance has been covered over. One of the girls begins sleepwalking, banging her head into a wardrobe. One of them creates an imaginary friend.

As the horror escalates, eventually the Warrens are brought in. There are some nice scenes between the families before things get crazy. Again, the film takes time to develop relationships. The Warrens are caring and kind. The Perrons are frazzled, but they take comfort in their new friends.

The Warrens bring a crew with them. They set up cameras and audio recording devices. They need to prove the house is haunted before the Catholic church will do an exorcism. These scenes are so well done. They bring a new edge to the thrills and terror. It all culminates in a big showdown between the evil spirit and these two families.

Not everything works. Some of the stuff with the Warrens before they meet the Perrons runs a little long. They keep returning to the Annabelle doll, and after a while it really feels like they are just prepping us for the inevitable Annabelle movie.

I’ve seen this movie three or four times now, so the jump scares no longer thrill, and it no longer keeps me up at night. That’s to be expected. But I do keep coming back to it. That’s the sign of a good horror movie – when you watch it again and again even though it no longer truly scares you.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Amityville Horror (1979)

For the last several years, I’ve tried to watch every film in a horror franchise during the month of October. I’ve seen the Friday the 13th films and all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, plus Halloween and Scream and their respective sequels. It has been a fun endeavor. Everyone knows that horror sequels can take a pretty steep decline in quality the further you get into them. For a long time, I tended to avoid them as I didn’t want to taint the originals with terrible sequels. But since I’ve become a bigger horror hound, I like being able to say I’ve watched an entire franchise.

And it is true, oftentimes the sequels are dreadful. But sometimes they can be quite good. Or at least they can take things into interesting new dimensions.

This year I’ve decided I want to tackle The Conjuring universe. Well, I’m not sure I’m going to watch all of the films, as there are a lot of them, depending on how deep you want to go. This is where I definitely say I won’t be reviewing all the films in this franchise.

The Conjuring films follow Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), real-life demonologists who studied the supernatural. There are currently four Conjuring films, but it has also spawned a couple of spin-offs. Three of them follow a possessed doll, and two involve some kind of evil nun.

The Warrens also visited the house in Amityville that contained so many horrors. Amityville Horror spawned two official sequels (which I reviewed here) and a remake, but because you can’t copyright a town’s name, there have been loads of unofficial sequels. I definitely won’t be reviewing all of them.

I’m also not sure if I’ll watch all the Annabelle and Nun movies. I’ll probably dip my toe into them, but if the first ones are bad, I doubt I’ll watch the sequels. But I will definitely watch The Conjuring movies and write about them.

To start this series off, I thought it would be fun to go back and watch the original Amityville Horror. Without it, there would be no Conjuring films.

I’ve seen Amityville Horror a few times now (and I even reviewed it here). It is not a good movie. The pacing is weird. There aren’t enough scares. It never builds any real sense of dread, and in the end there just isn’t any boogeyman or villain.

But there is something about it that makes me keep returning to it. Every couple of years I’ll get a hankering to watch it again, despite me knowing it isn’t as good as I want it to be. I think I want to like it, and after a few years I forgot how not good it is. But I do remember James Brolin’s big hair and awesome beard, and how amazing Margot Kidder looks in it. So I watch it and then go “oh yea, this film is bad.” Give me a couple more years, and I’ll probably watch it again.

One thing I always forget is that Ed and Lorraine do not make an appearance in this film. I always expect them to show up at the end, but they never do. I don’t believe they appear in the book this film is based on. My understanding is that they did show up at the house for some kind of TV special after the book became a hit. So, I guess this film really shouldn’t be included in The Conjuring universe, but as I say, there would be no Conjuring films without this one.

I pretty much stand by my original review, so I don’t think there is any need to rehash those thoughts. I was thinking about the screenplay as I watched it this time, and it is a bit of a mess. My guess is that it follows the book pretty well and, in a supposed non-fictional account, the book is probably pretty scary (at least if you buy into any of this stuff. I should probably note that this is all nonsense. The Warrens were charlatans. They made up most of their stories out of whole cloth and likely fed into the delusions of many others.) But reading a book about a haunting can sound real. Watching a movie like this borders on the ridiculous.

Because unlike something like The Exorcist or Poltergeist, there doesn’t seem to be any real villain in this film. A couple of chairs move on their own, a girl gets locked inside a closet, a priest gets attacked by a bunch of flies, etc. Even at its most hysterical, all we hear is a voice, and a door gets blown off its hinges. We never see the entity or get any kind of explanation for it. The priest (an overacting Rod Steiger) thinks it’s the devil, but his story never really gets going.)

The film literally ends with them just driving away. Nothing really tries to stop them. And that’s it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Bone Tomahawk (2015)

bone tomahawk

There aren’t a lot of Western/Horror hybrids for some reason. I don’t know why as it would seem like the barren landscapes of the West and the isolated communities filled with all sorts of outlaws would lend itself to horror, but I guess not. Maybe the audiences for those two genres are considered too far apart to make bringing them together worth it.

Controversial director S. Craig Zahler gave it a pretty good shot with his debut film Bone Tomahawk. Storywise it is primarily a Western but its graphic use of violence and impending sense of doom give it a good dose of horror.

In discussing the Western Genre I’ve not spoken much about its depictions of Native Americans (though we did have a good discussion in the comments section a while back). Generally speaking, the Western’s depiction of Native Americans has not been good. They were usually depicted as nameless, faceless savages attacking, raping, and murdering the pure and righteous white people who had come to the new land to save them from their savage ways.

Zahler (who also wrote the script) tries to work his way around this problem within the genre by having an Indian character (Zahn McClarnon) state that the film’s villains aren’t real Indians, but Troglodytes, cannibalistic savages that belong to no tribe. And thus hand waiving the whole problem away. But this is a Western set in the American West and the villains sure do look a lot like Indians, and they sure are savage. If you can get past that (and the really, truly, gruesome violence) then you are in for a bit of a treat.

A stranger (David Arquette) stumbles into the small town of Bright Hope. He buries his ill-gotten treasure before wandering into a bar. The town’s Back-Up Deputy Chickory (Richard Jenkins) spies the bag burial and tells Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) about the suspicious nature of it all. They question the man who pushes Chickory down and tries to escape, getting shot in the leg by Hunt for his trouble.

They call in the doctor’s daughter Samantha (Lili Simmons) to take the bullet out of the stranger’s leg. Somewhere in the night our villains sneak into town and kidnap the stranger, a deputy, and Samantha.

In the light of day Sheriff Hunt, Chickory, Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson) who has a broken leg, and a dandyish gunslinger named John Brooder (Matthew Fox) all head for the valley where the enemy camps.

All of this is fairly standard Western stuff. Zahler gives it a lazy energy in the first half which is punctuated by some wonderful dialog and terrific performances by all involved. As they finally come to the enemy camp things turn horrific as the bad guys are truly abhorrent. I won’t go into details but let’s just say cannibalism isn’t their worst trait.

I’ve seen a lot of horror films in my day so I’m fairly immune to graphic violence, but this gets pretty intense. I do appreciate a film that doesn’t shy away from the realities of violence. Westerns have a tendency to have bloodless gunfights where the worst that happens to a man when he gets shot is that he falls off a building. Real violence is full of blood and gore and is horrible in every way. There is something to be said for a film to show that.

If you can stomach the violence and the hand-waiving away of the genre’s casual racism, Bone Tomahawk is a rather terrific bit of genre filmmaking.