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Ten years after its debut in theaters, James Wan’s “The Conjuring” remains an outstanding example of horror filmmaking. Taking cues from the spiritual paranoia of “The Exorcist” and the procedural slow-build of Wan’s first “Saw” film, “The Conjuring” deploys recurring genre tropes and themes with utter confidence, resulting in some of the most iconic sequences and iconography in contemporary horror.

Based on real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, the film has spawned a horror franchise worth over $2.1 billion including two spinoff series: “The Nun,” and the prequel “Annabelle.”

Though successful at the box office, “The Conjuring” almost never got made. The original treatment detailing the film’s basic plot, written by producer Tony DeRosa-Grund over the span of 20 years before the film released in 2013, was based on the original interview between the real Warrens and Carolyn Perron, the mother of a family that supposedly experienced demonic occurrences in their newly purchased farmhouse.

The main plot of “The Conjuring” heavily dramatizes the Perron family case, including a chilling prologue centered on the Annabelle doll. This opening was also based on a case investigated by the real life Warrens. Annabelle’s haunting of two friends and the investigation by Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) could have easily been the focus of the film. (Annabelle, of course, soon got her own spinoff series.)

The two friends find themselves haunted by Annabelle after allowing a demonic spirit, which claimed to be a 7-year-old girl who died in their apartment, to possess the doll. Unbeknownst to them, the spirit planned on taking over one of the friends’ bodies before the Warrens stepped in.

Wan’s cold open introduces us to the manipulative, unknowable power of evil within early on. Annabelle haunts the friends by leaving notes around their apartment, knocking loudly on their door and reappearing in the building even after being tossed away. Wan’s camera sticks close to the friends and even reacts to loud noises alongside them, thereby making the audience an active, frightened participant in the story.

The Annabelle sequence primes us for Wan’s style later in the film. He uses lengthy tracking shots following his characters, reinforcing that we are right there alongside them. The camera continues to react to suspicious sounds by panning over quickly to mysterious doorways or cutting rapidly to surprised reactions. The characters are often shown through mirrors or other reflective surfaces, constantly evoking anxiety that something may be behind them.

Such camera techniques enhance a slow building of tension over the course of “The Conjuring” that is consistently off-putting. This style makes many of the film’s common horror tropes feel original in execution. Yes, the film has frequent jumpscares, creepy smiling demon children, instances of characters walking slowly towards doorways or noises that unquestionably spell out disaster. But “The Conjuring” also has a restraint and an empathy that many other horror movies might replace with cruelty or exploitation.

Wan doesn’t treat his characters as disposable pieces of flesh to be killed off or mutilated for shock value. Rather, the film cares about these relatively normal people: Carolyn and Roger Perron (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston, respectively) as well as their five daughters. The film delves into the family’s childhood joys, economic struggles and housekeeping mundanities before thrusting them into a living nightmare.

Even the Warrens, expert paranormal investigators, have their own insecurities. Lorraine is a clairvoyant, for instance, with the ability to see demonic spirits from past events haunting the innocent of the present. This causes her great distress, however, and very nearly compromises the exorcism of demons in the Perron household. The film’s characters are so likable, and in some ways relatable, that we are genuinely frightened when they partake in aforementioned horror tropes.

The horror in “The Conjuring” is not only emotionally effective, but it’s also efficient. The film leaves no room for doubt that demons exist in its world, sidestepping skepticism of otherworldly intervention and reluctance to accept spiritual guidance, which are almost obligatory to horror films dealing with the supernatural. As a result, Wan is able to create striking scare sequences as early and frequently as possible.

One such sequence involves a twist on the hide-and-clap game that the Perron daughters play earlier in the film. (The game involves one person with her eyes closed trying to find everyone else in the house by asking them to clap three times.) The scene, which sees Carolyn investigating strange clapping noises one night and eventually being lured into the basement, is a Horror 101 crash course in itself.

There are long stretches of almost painful silence punctuated by loud scares that feel natural like the basement door closing on Carolyn and knocking her downstairs. The scene could potentially be its own horror short film, concluding with Carolyn lighting matches to try to see the hidden threat, whose hands appear from the darkness behind her to let out a bone-chilling clap.

Scattered moments like this hide-and-clap “game” build to a climax which unleashes all of the tension and foreboding that haunts the audience for nearly two hours. The Warrens discover the house once belonged to a witch named Bathsheba, who soon possesses Carolyn. Having failed to get authorization for an official exorcism from the Church, the Warrens must perform the procedure themselves before Bathsheba kills her.

With clever, gradual storytelling and impressive cinematography, Wan narrowly avoids issues that plague other horror films by making his tropes matter. “The Conjuring” evokes a primal fear we have as horror viewers – sitting in a dark room and turning around, peering into the darkness we are engulfed in to make sure nothing is behind us. A decade later, it’s difficult to see the film as anything less than a well-oiled scare machine and a modern classic.

Published on October 24, 2023 at 11:08 pm