The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It Should Have Stuck to the Haunted Houses
There is no moral panic in the Conjuring universe. Bathsheba Sherman, the infant-sacrificing ghost who torments the Peron family in the first film, is the descendant of a woman who was hanged during the Salem witch trials—the implication being that the executioners were onto something. The Conjuring 2 gives the Ouija board burner a show that playing with the homemade version is necessary to allow demonic elements into the Enfield council house in which the London-based sequence takes place. And the new The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It takes paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) into the '80s, where Satanists lurk in quiet communities, children targeted for dark rituals. do - an idea raised straight from the dreaded news reports from the era. If you're right, it's not mass hysteria, and in these movies, the Warrens inevitably are, while their doubts and suspicions are soon presented by psychic displays or evidence of the supernatural. Thankfully for the audience as well as the franchise, the real-life Warrens passed away before they had a chance to appear in QAnon.
This is part of the appeal of conjuring films, that their vision of the world is so straightforward, uninterested in how the complexities of reality can cause people to experience terrifying things. They are anti-psychotic horror movies, in which terrifying things happen because of evil, which are not only present in everyday life, but tangible, spread like infections by devil-worshippers, cursed places, and occult objects. Didn't think in advance. Then comes Warren, through sitcom parents (Ed brave and bombastic, Lorraine fragile and determined, Wilson and Farmiga infuse their relationship with an easy affection), who introduce a reassuring certainty that things will work. But there are external forces that can be diagnosed and defeated. This format has been effective enough to spawn a multi-pronged, eight-movie-strong franchise whose installments do not directly include the Warrens, although none of the later titles survived the major adventures of the 2013 original from James Wan. , which (to use the technical term) was creepy as all bullshit.
The Devil Made Me Do It is directed not by Wan (who returned for a 2016 sequel), but by Michael Chaves of The Curse of La Llorona, which from Joe Wan's point of view is enough of a time and misdirection. They also come without doing well. Rival Lily Taylor is being lured into the basement to play hide and seek with a ghost. It's not Chave's takeover that makes this new film feel like it ran off the rails—it's the choice from a haunting to focus on a murder. The position has always been a part of conjuring films, in which demon-controlled characters attempt to kill their children or themselves in the climax moments before the Warrens intervene. But in The Devil Made Me Do It, Arne Johnson (Rurie O'Connor) actually manages to murder the apartment's landlord and his girlfriend, Debbie (Sarah Katherine Hooks), for rent — though, as would happen in the movie, It's all because of the demon she absorbed during the exorcism of Debbie's younger brother, David (Julian Hilliard). The Warrens are too late to stop the murder, but they contact Arne's lawyer and offer to help him prove that he is not guilty by reason of demonic possession.
Like its predecessors, The Devil Made Me Do It begins with a note on how it is based on a true story, and ends with photographs of the real people involved. The franchise's relationship with Truth has always been at the border of the camp: the real Warrens were the publicity-seeking charlatans, whose marriage reportedly involved a long affair Ed had cultivated with an underage girl; In the real Arne Johnson case, the petition for demonic possession was promptly dismissed by the judge. But the way this new movie uses the actual murder of Alan Bono and makes excuses breaks the boundaries of good fun, not to mention good taste. Arne, who was convicted of murder in real life, is innocent on-screen, begging David, the Father Karras-style demon, to enter his body. He becomes a martyr who fights for his soul while exposed to nefarious forces behind bars, while Debbie continues to be by his side and the Warrens work to get to the bottom of what happened. The trial isn't given much screen time, but it's implied that the couple's efforts played a key role in the rescue, saving Arne from the death penalty as well as a mysterious occultist played by Eugenie Bondurant.
And for all this, Arne's scenes in prison are a suspense-less bore, interrupting the pace of the film whenever it feels appropriate to cut him. The Devil Made Me Do It has already had enough of it to find that audiences haven't been asked to invest in a character who's an empty pot. It has to be figured out what the Conjuring film looks like when it isn't about a particular place - although the highlights of the film, apart from an appearance by John Noble as a retired priest, remain parts that are familiar. When we see the flashback of how David came to be in the first place. It includes a wonderful period-appropriate sequence that features something hidden in a bed of water that has been left behind by the previous owners of the place where David's family lives. Staring at the spot where the bed used to be, the Warrens discover stains on the floor—a literal rot as evil as something wrong with eating under the floor.
The Conjurings have always been at their best when they have nightmares about the horrific things that find their way into the sanctum of a home, when they play on paranoia about home places that are actually safe for a poisoned family. are for. The Devil Made Me Do It trains its gaze on the boy next door, insisting that it is equally unimaginable that such a man would do something as unimaginable as murder—that something else would be pulling the string. But the truth is that it's not hard to imagine at all.