KYLA DEAVER AND LILI TAYLOR IN THE CONJURING: A HORROR FILM WITH COLORS AND CLOTHES YUCKIER THAN DEMONS Once more, with feeling: creeping you out the same old way
The Conjuring, directed by James Wan (
Saw, Insidious) is being praised not because it's a horror movie that's original in any conceivable way, but because it works. And it does work, due to the good actors involved and taking itself pretty seriously. It's based on a "true story," insofar as anything related by longtime paranormal investigators or "demonologists" Lorraine and Ed Warren, whose most famous case was "The Amityville Horror," was ever "true." Any rational person is bound to walk out acknowledging it was surprisingly involving, even sort of disturbing, but wondering what the point is of making such a film. Why use such hoary trappings and methods to try to coax an audience, for the Nth time, into believing for an hour or two in demons and hauntings and the need for exorcism? Why do something that was fresh, new, and ambitious in 1973 when William Friedkin delivered
The Exorcist -- a much better director with a more notable cast and more interesting script, by the way -- but is as dead as a doorbell today? Ultimately I think I found the sickly color schemes and hideous Seventies clothes styles featured in
The Conjuring more memorably nauseating than its familiar scary movie trappings.
The movie starts with Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson, earnest but a bit blah) and his wife Lorraine (Vera Farmiga, soft and convincing), the real-life "demonologists" who go around giving lectures on their work and are called in to help in cases of haunting and possession. It's the early Seventies, a year or two before
The Exorcist came out. We soon move to the hapless family, the Perrons, Carolyn (an earnest, hard-workingn Lili Taylor) and Roger (an ordinary Ron Livingston), and their five little girls, most of whom have the requisite long hair and penchant for long, Victorian-style nighties. We'll see them in those a lot, because the trouble starts happening at night. Lorraine keeps getting pulled about in bed, and strange bruises appear here and there on her body, while one daughter sleepwalks and keeps bumping into an old dresser. The littlest girl, April (Kyla Deaver) adopts an ancient pop-up toy she finds with a mirror in it that turns out to show glimpses of the requisite nasties from years long past, when of course, there were killings and suicides and other such events in the neighborhood, it turns out. All the clocks keep stopping at the hour of 3:07.
Not a good idea to buy a house at auction from a bank, which this cash-strapped family has done. Ed it seems drives a big rig or something -- it's a bit vague -- which would leave the family untended while the scary things taunt and torment them. There are oddities in the setup. The family arrives at the house followed, apparently, by a moving van, but it's never too clear how they move in. And oddest of all, they "discover" that the house has a cellar: you'd think anyone would know a big old house would have one. And Ed goes down to see if he can get the furnace working, because it's getting cold at night (the cold is from the evil sprits though; and they also bring horrible rotting smells). This is one clueless family. When the clattering sounds and night torments and crashing down family photos on the stairwell get to be too much for them, they call in the Warrens. At each step of the way in the events that follow Ed doesn't want Lorraine to go. He says it take too much out of her. She's the one with the special senses, who "sees things," and each "seeing" "takes a bite out of her," the last one having taken a particular toll. Funny thing is the real life Lorraine is still around, hale and hearty at age 86; she came to this movie's opening.
Though this is only an amalgam of many other horror movies, a number of which are much more stylish and good-looking, and a mere shadow of
The Exorcist when it comes to the coaxing out of an evil spirit that possesses poor Lili Taylor, it proceeds with storytelling skill. Shots of a happy day before the move-in when the Perron family went to the beach are an effective contrast; a "hide and clap" game is nicely scary. Somehow there doesn't need to be a body count or revolting images to hold our attention. Certain "explanations" borrowed from the real-life Warrens help carry things along, such as that they're dealing not with ghosts but evil spirits, and that those can't inhabit objects but only people. What that means I can't say, but it somehow adds conviction. It's fun also when the Warrens bring in a crew of helpers, including a techie (Shannon Kook) and a non-believer cop. Catholic priests are called in, but the Vatican authorizes an exorcism too late, and Ed has to do it himself. The movie gets a little too heavy on the special effects at that point, but it's competing with much more over-the-top current efforts, and its strength is generally the way it keeps things simple The scary critters, a dead boy, a Victorian suicidal maid, etc., are strictly standard-issue, but at least they are not overworked in the climactic scenes. The director gets more out of a hanging rope and a gnarly old tree than out of them -- and of course, the hideous Seventies clothes and nauseating colors.
Some of Mark Isham's music is really good, especially the hypnotic, enveloping sounds that accompany the closing credits. You might be well advised to stay to the very last one. Props also to the art director and production, set, and costume designers -- Geoffrey S. Grimsman, Julie Berghoff, Sophie Neudorferm and Kristin M. Burke for all the subtly ugly stuff on screen.
The Conjuring, 112 mins., opened in the US 19 July 2013.
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