At the end of James Wan’s The Conjuring, I had a big smile on my face at the thought of a studio building a smart and fun horror franchise using Ed and Lorraine Warren as the foundation, and tonight, after seeing The Conjuring 2, I am relieved to see that they got it absolutely right. In movies from “Saw” to “Furious 7”, and now “The Conjuring 2”, a sequel to his ghostly 2013 hit, the filmmaker bypasses higher brain function, plugging directly into the peanut-shaped circuit board – buried deep beneath your to-do lists – that makes you jump out of your skin when you hear a loud noise. “Out of the repertoire of cases they investigated over their lifetime, Enfield is one of the most compelling…and frightening”.
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We don’t usually expect horror films to become critical darlings, let alone horror sequels, but “The Conjuring 2” has earned impressive reviews with an impressive 75% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes.
The stories and experiences of the Warren and Hodgson families are finely intertwined so that the audience feels that a loss for either family would greatly affect the other. Ed and Lorrain’s mission is to find out the truth about reports that say that an 11-year-old girl who sleepwalks and levitates, indeed became possessed by a demon. Director James Wan, who also directed The Conjuring, returns as the director of the sequel.
The Conjuring 2 is a very sweet horror movie.
Instead, Wan chose to take his lead characters out of their element by focusing on the Warren’s real life case, in highly populated North London, England, where a single parent family living in close-knit Enfield council/public housing is being stalked by a poltergeist. The fascination will surely continue with the release of The Conjuring 2. This is a couple who we would follow into the darkness, and frankly, these movies wouldn’t work without them.
Wan leans into the real history of the 1977 Enfield poltergeist legend, too, though it’s not like he needs any extra inspiration for his fright fest – when it comes to horror, the man pulls no punches or screams.
Seven years after Amityville, Ed and Lorraine are summoned to a modest old home in the London borough of Enfield, where single mother Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Conner) and her four children are besieged by a poltergeist.
The Warrens, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, enter the infamous haunted house for the first time. At times it feels like an adventure, and this is where the film jerks you back into the realm of horror with another supernatural sighting.
IN AN age when horror movies are a dime a dozen, it is hard to create a film in the genre that is still truly frightening.
I loved it. It’s amusing, a lot of people talked to me about how much they like the moving camera work, and one of the things I love about what I did in this movie is actually the one scene where we stopped the camera from moving.
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If “The Conjuring 2” is not quite the achievement of the original (and what sequel is?), it nevertheless manifests a canny understanding of what modern audiences expect from a ghost story, delivering slowly mounting dread, punctuated by alternating bursts of terror and laughter. Yet Wan and his team of screenwriters build that doubt into the film.
