Image: New Line Cinema

The Conjuring

Director: James Wan
Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston
Length: 112 minutes
Country: USA

James Wan’s The Conjuring isn’t a film which scores high on originality. Writers Chad and Carey Hayes have gleefully rummaged through horror’s basement and brought back a plethora of genre tropes, from creepy dolls to creaky doors to that pet dog who seems to sense the danger before anyone else does. Even the film’s claim to be based on a true story feels like a throwback to one of the film’s more obvious antecedents, 1979’s The Amityville Horror. But The Conjuring is not a mere greatest hits collection of horror clichés. It is a legitimately chilling but highly accessible film which rightly works under the belief that a decades-old toolkit can still craft some new scares when used thoughtfully.

The film’s setup is unapologetically familiar. Fittingly set in 1971, Lili Taylor (Short Cuts, Say Anything…) and Ron Livingston (Office Space, Swingers) play the unfortunate couple who, along with their five daughters, move into an old, rundown farm house in Rhode Island. After a few spooky occurrences, the couple wisely decide to bring in real-life paranormal investigators (famous today for their involvement in the ‘real’ Amityville Horror case) Ed and Lorraine Warren, respectively played by Patrick Wilson (Insidious, Watchmen) and Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air, The Departed). The cast sells this old tale exceptionally well, with even the younger actors conveying a sense of real terror. Farmiga, in particular, draws considerable empathy with an understated but vulnerable performance.

Wan puts almost every trick he knows to good use, employing queasy camerawork, well-earned jump scares and a dissonant score

However, it is director James Wan who takes it upon himself to provide the chills. The film earns its 15 rating more through its intense atmosphere than its violence. Wan puts almost every trick he knows to good use, employing queasy camerawork, well-earned jump scares and a dissonant score to suggest the suffocating omnipresence of evil in the characters’ lives, before kicking things up a gear into claustrophobic panic whenever the story calls for it. This is a film which rarely lets you forget that you’re supposed to be afraid. Those who like their horror films with slow, subtle build-ups may be disappointed by the film’s often impatient transitions from one big scare to the next, but this approach might be for the best: the film’s weakest moments tend to be among the few instances where the script takes a pause from the spooky goings on for scenes of exposition and character development. Part of the problem lies in how Wan doesn’t seem to have entirely worked out how to consistently keep up the film’s ominous tone during scenes of people talking in broad daylight, leading to the occasional break in tension. This causes the film to lose some of its momentum and, overall, renders the film a slightly lighter affair than it should be. Such predecessors as The Exorcist and The Omen manage to sustain their sense of satanic dread throughout, leading to a fluent culmination of terror at the core of those films. The Exorcist feels like a film genuinely spawned from evil. The Conjuring merely conveys evil, albeit very effectively. Then again, the fact that The Conjuring doesn’t fully immerse itself into its demonic nightmare allows for a film which may fare just as well with the thrill-seeking blockbuster crowd as it will with the ‘70s horror aficionados. Not everyone wants to spend two hours feeling bummed out.

James Wan is perhaps still best known as the creator of the gimmicky Saw franchise and the writer and director of its first instalment. While the first Saw is easily the strongest of the series, its hammy performances and overwrought style suggest a director who doesn’t know the difference between a horror film and a Scuzz TV music video. Nine years later, The Conjuring is confirmation that not only does Wan have a horror nostalgist in him but also that very nostalgist is also a gifted filmmaker. In an era of post-Tarantino self-awareness, it’s refreshing to see a work of sincere, irony-free genre cinema done this well. The likes of Scream, Planet Terror and The Cabin in the Woods can certainly be a blast but when so many talented writers and directors try to position themselves above traditional horror, one can’t help but feel that today’s kids are being seriously deprived of old-school frights. Plenty of horror films from recent years have been fun, suspenseful, unsettling and even insightful. The Conjuring reminds us what it means for a film to be scary.

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