Review: ‘The Conjuring

Okay, folks, I am a day late and a dollar short on this one, but “The Conjuring” proved to be so popular and generally well liked that I just gotta get something down, on the record, so to speak, as I have finally gotten around to seeing this supposedly “based on a true story” horror movie and there are a couple of things that might be worth noting. You know. For posterity.

So in case ya haven’t heard, “The Conjuring” is on real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) and is loosely based on an investigation of a haunted home in the 1970’s in which a family was terrorized by what was deemed to be a demonic spirit. Good times. Directed by James Wan (Saw, Insidious, Death Sentence), this is a 1970’s styled horror movie, as it is mostly tension built through atmosphere and mood, but with the modern favorite of loading the whole thing with jump scares to keep things moving along, resulting in a pretty decent horror film that has a few things going for it.

Even though James Wan helped popularize the whole “torture porn” thing of the 2000’s, he’s now shown that he can make these types of movies that can actually be about characterization and people as opposed to just trying to come up with something scary. By having real people to base this stuff on, he had more to work with and likely felt more connected to the stories of the people, which definitely comes across because there is a surprising character-beat at the end that actually also works as a big plot point type of thing during the climax, as Wan uses a small emotional moment and manages to amplify it and make it more resonant and important.

Like the movies of the 1970’s, the time period this movie is set in, the atmosphere is laid on pretty thick, lots of low tones on the soundtrack and stretches of eerie quiet magnifying the tension, which doesn’t let up very often once the weirdness starts happening in the house. This 70’s vibe even extends to the opening title card, which scrolls upwards and definitely feels like something from that time, almost invoking “The Exorcist” in a way, and that comparison isn’t very off when it comes to the content of the film, quality of each film aside, as it’s obvious that “The Exorcist” influenced this movie just like it has hundreds of other movies in the last few decades, so no big surprise there, but still nice to see, an indicator that James Wan and his team had their horror hearts in the right spot.

But this ain’t the 1970’s, this is 2013, so this movie is full of the things that have becomes popular in horror movies for the last decade or so. First off there are the jump scares, which is when the movie gets very quiet, things are at their most tense, and something suddenly goes BANG and the character on screen gets scared and hopefully it makes the audience JUMP because it scares them, like when a frog jumps on a person when they don’t expect it, know what I mean? They are cheap and easy and if you do enough of them, you will eventually get everyone with some of these things, but they don’t have any lasting effect. Movies like “The Shining” and “The Thing” and even “The Ring” are great horror films without relying on jump scares for the all the frights, and unfortunately this movie goes to that particular well quite often. And it’s not like these jump scares are bad or shouldn’t be in the movie, but there are just so many of them, it’s overkill.

They also used a little bit of the good ole CGI, and for a movie set in this time period and what they were going for, less CGI would have been better, no CGI would have been best, because the few uses of it in this movie stand out like a sore thumb, glaringly obvious when compared to the very real world around them. There isn’t much blood in this film, but what is there is usually of the digital variety, and it just looked fake. Same for a rocking chair that flies across a room by itself, which is odd because that seems like an effect they could have pulled off for real somehow. Maybe it was a child safety issue type of thing.

What really sold this movie is all the acting, because including Wilson and Fermiga, Ron Livingston and Lily Taylor really showed up to work on this thing, all of them putting in very good performances, totally buying into their characters and really doing a great job grounding some of the more ridiculous elements of this movie. It’s obvious when actors just phone it in as opposed to putting in some real work, and you can see the work in this movie and it pays off, it’s why the emotional beats worked towards the end, because they did a good job in making us care about these people in the beginning.

So this was a pretty decent movie, which is actually par for the course so far for James Wan as far as I am concerned. All of his movies have some good stuff going for them, they all have their drawbacks, and in the end, he gets to keep making more movies. I am very interested to see what this guy who has trafficked mostly in horror does with the final “Fast & Furious” movie, maybe that will be the one to see him really break out and make that masterpiece lurking inside him.

Or maybe not.