The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)

When I wrote about The Amityville Horror at the beginning of this month, I noted that every October I try to watch every film in some horror franchise. That wasn’t 100% true. I do try to complete an entire horror franchise, but I don’t usually watch all the films within the month. What I mean is, I try to watch all of the films I haven’t seen within a certain franchise. I don’t always watch the ones I’ve already seen.

I also don’t write about them all. With The Conjuring films, I decided to watch and review them all. Even though there are only four films in this series (well, there are technically nine films within the Conjuring universe, but I decided to just concentrate on the main films), I already understand why trying to review them all was a mistake. Like all horror franchises, there is a definite diminishing of returns with each sequel.

Last Rites purports to be the final film starring Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), and it definitely feels like it’s time to put them to bed.

In all of my reviews, I’ve talked about the real-life Warrens. I’ve called them charlatans. And they were. They made up stories about hauntings and possessions and presented them as truth. It is unclear if the families supposedly investigated by the Warrens were in on the scam or not. It seems likely that many of them truly thought they were being haunted, and the Warrens took advantage of that, wrote a book about it, and cashed the checks. But there were also allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse.

The Warrens were not good people. While watching the first movie in this series, you can kind of overlook that. There is a sort of tacit agreement that you are watching a movie. It isn’t real. It has ghosts, after all. It helps that it is a very good movie.

But each subsequent film works on beautifying the Warrens. It portrays them as loving, kind Christians out to help these poor people beset by demons out of the kindness of their hearts and at great personal peril. That makes the films more and more difficult to take. It is harder to separate who they really were and how they are portrayed on screen. Also, the filmmaking gets increasingly worse.

Last Rites begins with the Warrens’ first case. They are faced with, um, a haunted mirror. Yeah, these films deal in haunted objects; they make a big deal out of the Warrens’ museum of the occult. They made a whole film series out of a haunted doll. But at least that thing looks scary (the real Annabell looks like a Raggedy Anne doll, which is just hilarious). A mirror is, well, it’s just a mirror.

Anyway, the demon mirror forces a very pregnant Loraine into labor. Their baby comes out stillborn, but a little fervent prayer brings her to life. Flash forward a couple of decades, and the Warrens are taking a break from ghost busting due to Ed’s bad ticker. That daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), is all grown up and engaged to Tony (Ben Hardy).

Meanwhile, the Smurl family has somehow wound up with that demon mirror, and it’s causing all sorts of horror in their household. Naturally, the Warrens get drawn into the case. This time, they bring their daughter and her fiancé. That brings an extra layer of family into the mix.

James Wan directed the first two Conjuring films, and he has a kinetic energy that makes the scares truly terrifying and an adept ability to make the character stuff work. This film is directed by Michael Chaves, and he’s not nearly as good.

The script does him no favors. It relies far too heavily on the relationship between the Warrens and, as I’ve already stated, I can no longer separate what I know about the real family and this fictional one. The stuff with the Smurl family isn’t all that interesting or scary. A mirror just isn’t intrinsically frightening (although they did a pretty good job of making one scary in Oculus). There is also a really fake-looking ghost with an axe and an old lady ghost with some terrible makeup.

The film does a lot of that thing where a horror movie will set up a scene like it’s preparing you for a jump scare, and then it will be something mundane, only to really throw the scare at you a moment later. That sort of thing has become tedious on its best days, and here you get it far too many times.

With a runtime of 2 hours and 15 minutes, it is entirely too long. This is mostly due to this being the last film and them needing to wrap some things up for the Warrens. I was ready to turn the thing off way before then and say goodbye to the whole franchise.

31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring – The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

The first two Conjuring films followed a pattern. They began with Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) on a case. It won’t be the case that consumes the rest of the film, and they don’t actually show us much of it. But it does show us a bit of who the Warrens are and what they are about. It also sets up the villains for some side-quels.

Then we’ll shift to the family who will be haunted for the rest of the film. For half the film, it will cut back and forth between the Warrens doing their thing and the haunted family getting increasingly haunted.

There isn’t anything special about that setup, but it worked. It helped develop our characters and slowly ramped up the hauntings. For this, the third film in the franchise, they switched things up a bit. It does begin with the Warrens on a case. A young boy has been possessed; the Warrens are doing their best to free the child from the demon. Things go haywire. The demon nearly kills Ed. He has a heart attack.

But just as things are getting truly terrifying, a man named Arne (Ruairi O’Connor), who is the boyfriend of the possessed boy’s sister, demands that the demon leave the boy alone and enter him. It does, and things return to normal. For a while. But then Arne kills his landlord. At his trial, he pleads not guilty due to possession.

The formula has changed. The opening case isn’t tangentially related to our main plot; it is the main plot. In addition to that, whereas in the first two films we spend a great deal of time with the family as the haunting ramps up, this film is about a guy in prison. We get a few spooky scenes in the prison, but mostly this is the Warrens’ film.

They find a totem underneath the possessed kid’s house. That’s the sign of a devil-worshipping cult. The film then becomes a mystery. The Warrens try to figure out who put the totem there and what for.

All of this throws the balance off. What made the first two films work so well is that you got to know these characters. Not just the Warrens but the other families too. That made us care about their spiritual plight. We don’t get that with Arne or the rest of the family.

We’ve already spent two films with the Warrens. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well. Wilson and Farmiga are good actors, and they make the Warrens come alive. The central theme of these films is how their love for each other transcends all of the horror. But the more I watch these films, the more the real Warrens slip into my mind, and they were charlatans. That keeps tainting my feelings toward the films. Keeping the focus on them doesn’t help matters.

Neither does this satanic cult story. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t all that interesting either. There are some decent scares throughout, but it doesn’t build the tension like the other films did. And thus it becomes just another standard horror film without anything that makes it stand out.

31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Conjuirng 2

I often lie in bed at night thinking about a movie I just watched. I’ll think about the things I want to say about it and mentally compose a review. Normally, the next day I’ll sit down and actually write that review. Every now and again, I’ll wake up thinking that I actually did write the review instead of just thinking about it. This is one such occasion. I would have sworn I wrote and posted a review to The Conjuring 2, but no such luck. It has now been a couple of weeks since I watched the movie, so my memory of it has faded a bit. Normally, I’d just let it go and not write a review, but I made a promise that I’d review all the Conjuring films this scary season, so here goes (being that it is October 24 and I haven’t watched the two other films in the main series, I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to keep the promise, but I’ll try).

The first time I watched this sequel, I was disappointed. It wasn’t nearly as scary as the first one, and the family being haunted wasn’t nearly as interesting or well developed. But on this watch, my appreciation grew.

Plot-wise, this film is very similar to the first one. It begins with a story that is mostly unrelated to the main plot. This one begins with the haunting at Amityville. That’s an interesting choice, for before these films, the Warrens were best known for participating in The Amityville Horror. But that story has been told a couple of times before, and in truth, the Warrens didn’t show up until after the Lutz family had split. So here we get just a bit of a séance and indications that the horrors of that house are some of the most intense the Warrens have ever dealt with (that will be a recurring theme with these films, every story is the most crazy story they ever experienced.) Also, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) gets a vision of an evil nun.

Later, Ed (Patrick Wilson) will get some visions of that same nun and will paint a horrifying picture of her (one that he’ll hang in his office for some reason). The Nun will, of course, be the antagonist of a series of sidequal films. We’ll see more of her in the Warrens’ part of this film before they meet up with our family.

That family is the Hodgsons, led by Peggy (Frances O’Connor ) and her four children. They live near London in a rundown house. The oldest girl, Janet (Madison Wolfe), plays with an Ouija board and accidentally summons a demon. We get the same sort of jump scares as in the first one, though they amp them up a bit here. There are a variety of demons at play in this one, including an old man, The Crooked Man, and something else. Like most sequels, everything gets jacked up a bit.

But this time I found the slower parts with the Hodgson family to be good. They are a kind, working-class family just trying to get by. The father left some time ago, and Peggy is struggling to keep everything afloat. There are some nice character moments with the children and we get a real sense of who they are as a family before all hell breaks loose. I was less enthused about what the Warrens are up to at home. The nun stuff has some good scares, but isn’t all that interesting (and definitely doesn’t make me want to watch those films). And I’m already growing tired of them wrestling with whether or not they should continue this line of work. Here, Lorraine has visions of Ed being killed, and so she doesn’t want to take the case, but of course they take the case because there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. I don’t need that constant drama.

Once the two families get together, the scares get crazy. But like the first film, they are dolled out slowly at first. The two families get to know each other. WE once again see how kind and loving the Warrens are. Ed will help fix a leaking pipe, etc. All of that stuff works for me. I like the smaller scene and the smaller horror. Once things reach a fever pitch it starts to fell like so many other horror movies at the end.

It isn’t quite as good as the first film, but I’m still on board with this franchise.

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.