by Alan Liotta
There are essential elements to making a haunted house movie that works. Of course, the house must make unnatural noise and appear as a presence unto itself and seemingly normal events must seem extraordinary. But most importantly, you, the film-going audience, must care about the people who move into/live in the house. If you aren’t invested in their safety and sanity, then anything that happens in the house just seems plain silly.
All of the great haunted house movies, Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity, and The Haunting (the original one!) understood and exploited this. The movies that fail this test (any of the Amityville remakes, House on Haunted Hill (remake), etc) never gave you a reason to care about the occupants, and in some cases actually left you rooting for the House (or the evil spirits within).
The Conjuring, which easily could rank in the top five list of the best haunted house movies, understands and fully exploits this rule. This film isn’t just creepy, it is downright scary. Malaysian-born Director James Wan, best known for his horror films Saw and Insidious which earned him membership in the “Splat Pack” directors club, deliberately takes the opposite approach with his latest film.
The Conjuring ingeniously wraps the viewer in two ghost stories, the first involves the Perron family as they move into the property only to discover on the first night that things are not alright, with the second story involving Ed and Lorraine Warren, well-known paranormal investigators who are called upon to determine if demons infest the Perron home. Wan skips the bloodshed in this movie, and just turns to outright suspense and terror to bring the viewer to the edge of their seat repeatedly throughout the film.
He clearly understands the genre, and teases the audience by creating sequences where you think you know what will happen and prepare yourself not to jump, only to avoid that obvious outcome and then completely surprise/scare you into a jump out of your seat that you never saw coming. Making both the family and the Warrens all the more vulnerable is the fact that they do all the things you want them to do, they turn on the lights before they go into a room, they close a door rather than look behind it, they believe each other when one sees something that someone else doesn’t. The result is that you want to root for each of the protagonists, you feel as helpless as they do when they can’t protect one another, and you plead to “just get it over with!”
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are convincing and compelling as the paranormal investigators. Wan cleverly uses classroom lectures and “historical film footage” from their files, to explain key plot points and set up major scare sequences. Based on the true story of the actual Warrens, Farmiga and Wilson are as sure of themselves and their work as they are vulnerable and innocent when challenging the most horrific demons one is likely to encounter in cinema history. Lili Taylor, who plays Carolyn Perron, the mother of five girls and who bears the brunt of the demons’ anger, delivers a strong performance that holds the audience in her grip throughout the movie. Ron Livingston, who plays her husband, provides a strong character for Taylor to play off of, and the result is that the viewer generally cares for both these well-intentioned parents and their five girls.
The Conjuring is best seen in a theater with an audience that will react to the film in the “spirit” Wan intended. It pays homage to the classic haunted house movies while inventing new ground to show just how fresh the genre can be in the right hands. And if the last 20 minutes of this movie don’t hold you breathless and trembling, then you must be already dead. My criteria for horror movies is simple, if you make it then it better scare me to death, because that’s what I paid for. So many movies fail that simple test. The Conjuring does not – if you come to get scared, you’ll get more than your money’s worth!
Grade B+