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Bad stuff happens when you don’t put the new cover sheets on your TPS reports.
I can’t even handle scenes where something startling occurs, much less an entire horror movie. At the ’02 L.A. premier of Jackass: The Movie, the sound of Johnny Knoxville’s airhorn caused me to vomit blood all over my brand new Girl Skateboards tee-shirt. I signaled to the usher that they needed to stop the film, pleading for immediate medical attention. They ignored me, and by the third airhorn blast I entered cardiac arrest, prompting Chris Pontius to leap out of his seat and attempt CPR. Once the paramedics arrived, I was airlifted to the Mayo Clinic, where I slipped into a deep coma. The doctors said I would wake up in about a week or so and make a full recovery, with minimal long-lasting effects. Regardless, my father lobbied hard for them to pull the plug after 36 hours, and my mother was indifferent. Luckily, my boss from my old job showed up and convinced them to wait it out.
As a serious film reviewer though, I recognized that I had to overcome my fears. I would see The Conjuring, but not without taking ample precautions. The first two steps of my pre-theater prep were to violently induce vomiting and put on a double layer of Huggies, both completed before my niece arrived at my home to pick me up (she obviously knows not to beep when she pulls up the driveway). During the brief drive to the theater, I recited some inspirational speeches that I have memorized for whenever I need to overcome existential challenges. I wasn’t exactly confident, but I manned up and managed to get through The Conjuring whilst only soiling one of the Huggie layers.
The film is about a haunted house in 1970’s Rhode Island. For all of our foreign readers, Rhode Island is an American state that is not actually an island, but is named as such because the people who live there are stupid. The home is a rustic estate that has just been purchased by the super-white Perron family. The mother is portrayed by Lili Taylor, starring in her second film about a haunted house in the New York-Boston I-95 corridor (The Haunting). The father is played by Ron Livingston, starring in his second film in which he has had to be on guard against aggressive dark figures. They have five daughters, all very close in age, no doubt indicating that they were gunning for a boy.
The Conjuring is an all-around well-crafted instance of filmmaking, but we’ll begin with its strongest feature: the environment visuals. The film takes place almost exclusively inside the creaky old house or its run-down yard under a cold November sky. Despite this limitation, they managed to create a wonderfully colorful experience when there is very little color on screen to be had. Pretty much everything is gray or brown, save for the pale white faces of the actors, yet all of these hues over which your eyes would pass with nary a thought in most other films manage to pop in The Conjuring. When “real” colors are introduced, be it a creepy red music box or a fruit basket, it adds a ton of visual force to the shot.
There’s a perfect balance of scenes that take place at either dawn, day, dusk , or night, and the lighting for each of these settings is distinct; it all looks natural. You feel like you could go to the house right now, walk into any room shown in the film, and it would look exactly as such to your naked eye.
Early on, we follow the Perrons as they do day-to-day errands, while a bunch of strange things occur that don’t seem to rattle them one bit, like clocks breaking, birds crashing into the house, and various family members getting invisibly molested in their sleep. The characters’ responses to the scary stimuli throughout the movie seem believable, except in the very early stages. Why didn’t they just get outta Dodge?
You don’t get to see any of the haunting entities in the first act, and you may start to fear that this will be a two hour movie where nothing happens until a ghost appears briefly at the 1:56 mark. However, right when you’re about to checkout and figure there won’t be anything to see for quite some time, an “entity” shows up, right there, in plain view. It’s one of the all-time classic horror movie shots. What makes your first sight of the haunting presence so effective is its brevity, nonchalance, and deliberateness, as if the entity is saying “Yea, I live here, so what?”
Once the Perrons realize that it’s not normal to be getting your crap routinely kicked in by angry demons, they call in Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who, conveniently, are demonologists. They explain the backstory of why the house is haunted… crazy evil stuff happened long ago, and now there’s some none too pleased pseudo-afterlife dwellers wandering around. It’s standard stuff. If you’ve been an attentive viewer of horror flicks during your brief, pointless lifetime, then you can pretty much figure out when the filmmakers will attempt to throw in the next “startle” moment. That’s fine, though. The Conjuring is a good horror movie wrapped in a great movie. As a horror movie, it effectively carries out its prime directive of keeping you on the edge of your seat. However, The Conjuring accomplishes this not purely through its horror mechanics, which, as mentioned, are far from original; it does it by gaining your confidence. Once it becomes clear that every scene is well-written, well-shot, and well-acted, you’ll be clamoring for the next hint or sight of the demonic entity, not necessarily because it will scare the Grand Slam Breakfast out of you, but rather because it will be an ominous yet beautiful work of art. The Conjuring allows the viewer to become as invested as one could possibly be in a movie, and the investments usually pay off handsomely.
Unfortunately, as the film climaxes, and the human/demon limited war turns into a DEFCON 1 situation, it loses quite a bit of its luster. Evil spirits tend to not follow any particular rules of combat, so you start to creep back in your seat, waiting for random people/things to get tossed about with reckless abandon. As the plot fully unfolds, it becomes apparent that no big twist is to be had, and that things are pretty much going to have to end with a straight-up confrontation. Thus, as The Conjuring winds down, you’ll get a hint of disappointment creeping into the back of your mind, with that feeling coming to full fruition when the credits roll. Regardless, for the great bulk of its runtime, this film will provide you with escapism of the highest order, and you might manage to forget, for just a little bit, that the love of your life just had twins with the Cultural Geography T.A. who refused to write you a letter of recommendation for Saint Louis University’s two-year master’s program.
