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The Conjuring (2013) – Review

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Is this demon going to serve dinner or WHAT?!

Is this demon going to serve dinner or WHAT?!

I will be the first to tell you that horror is far from my favorite genre. It takes an awful lot to scare me, and when a film is able to crawl under my skin, I will certainly be one to praise it to end. The hype for this particular film has been unavoidable if you are plugged into the movie world at all. It is often cited as “the film too scary for PG-13″ even though it contains no vulgar language or gore. Reviews for the film have been generally very positive. I think the cast is very talented, with Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, and Ron Livingston involved. I hoped that this film would be a deviation from the exercises in jump scares that have been plaguing or cinemas over the past who knows how long. Unfortunately, it is simply another entry into that particular group.

This is about as standard a haunted house story as you can get. It is 1971. The Perrons (headed by Livingston and Lili Taylor) have just purchased a farmhouse out in the country. Things start to go bump in the night. Legs get pulled. Doors get closed. Pictures fall off walls. Everything you have seen before in other haunted house movies. Once things become rather stressful, they seek out the help of paranormal experts Ed and Lorraine Warren (Wilson and Farmiga). Pretty much immediately upon arriving at the house, they sense that things are not right and a demon is most likely the culprit. You can guess how the film plays out from there.

I am so sick of the constant usage of jump scares. The reason is because they are not scary. They are surprising. They give you a shot of adrenaline to keep you watching the film. They do very little to create any sort of dread, menace, or evil in the atmosphere. I can slam a door really hard in my apartment, and my roommate will jump accordingly. It is a reflexive action. It is not an earned one. To earn being scared, you have to carefully craft your scenes in a way that could result in something terrible happening at any second. Walking down a hallway and having a door slam by itself is just loud.

The film does try to introduce elements that could be used to up the creep factor a lot, such as a music box or a porcelain doll, but these things ultimately get tossed out to the curb in order to make room for the tired, overdone surprise tactics. The doll, especially, had the potential to do some damage, and they spend an awful long time setting it up. The result of it is just a big red herring that makes you scratch your head and wonder why it was even in the film to begin with.

As good as these actors are, they are not given anything substantial to do. They all fit into the archetype for this kind of film fairly well. Livingston and Taylor’s characters have five children and each of them performs being terrified quite well. The script just gives them all so little to do besides looking scared or acting a little odd to really comment very much on their performances.

James Wan chooses to implement a very floaty camera style to the film. It is very reminiscent to how Terrence Malick has his camera drift over locations and follow characters. I get that it supposed to half be the character’s point of view and half be the spirit that is following them, but the style grew rather tiresome. It moves around frenetically in order to catch a flash of something to jolt the audience. I appreciate trying to shoot the film in a different way, but ultimately, it does not do much to enhance the wretched script.

It is a shame that this film was not something special. There was only one time throughout the entire film where I was genuinely scared, in a scene involving laundry (I will leave it at that). The rest of the film is so familiar that you can guess dialogue verbatim before it is said. The good buzz surrounding this film is baffling to me. Nothing about it really grabbed me in any sort of meaningful or impactful way. The audience was largely silent during my screening. Even the jump scares did little to get a reaction out of them. I really wanted to like this film. I did. I want a new horror film that I can hold up in that pantheon of films that make me want to sleep with the lights on. After watching this, I will be able to sleep for long, uninterrupted hours. It is not a poorly made film by any stretch of the imagination. I can see what James Wan wanted to do with this. It just ended up being quite stale.

Grade: D



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