The Conjuring
DIRECTOR: James Wan
CAST: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Lili Taylor, Ron Livingston
CLASSIFICATION: 16V H
RUNNING TIME: 112 minutes
RATING: ****
EERIE and disquieting, The Conjuring is a well-crafted horror that emphasises creepy atmosphere over gore, referring back to Seventies horrors that freaked you out rather than grossed you out.
There’s no campy, over-the-top acting here, everyone plays their characters straight and low-key, terrified of what they cannot explain, and there’s lots of slamming doors, lights fizzling out at inopportune moments, pictures sliding off walls and creaky doors to make them jump.
Everyone is convincing as what they are meant to be and the theme of maternal instinct that runs throughout the story creates a link between Lili Taylor’s Caroline Perron and Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren and the eventual scary thing in the basement they have to overcome.
Set in the early Seventies, the film ostensibly gives us the true story of Ed (Wilson) and Lorraine Warren investigating the haunted home of the Perron family. The sets, costumes and cars help to create the feel of a period piece, further fuelling the Seventies horror tone.
First we are introduced to Ed and Lorraine, self-proclaimed paranormal investigators who deliver university lectures on Satanism as easily as they debunk hauntings that are more about bats in the belfry than actual ghosts.
The Warrens’ subject matter may be supernatural, but Wilson and Farmiga play the demon hunter and the clairvoyant as academics, worried about the toll work takes on their family life, quietly devoted to each other.
Then we are introduced to the Perron family with their five girls, moving into a dilapidated home which turns out to have bigger problems than peeling wallpaper.
They immediately start noticing some odd things happening, starting with the previously unknown basement full of dusty furniture and moving on to dead pets, bad smells and unexplained bruises. So, that’s a tick for the “things beyond our control” box of psychological terror.
By the time the Perrons call on the Warrens for help, the family is very much terrified and since the actors have created a group of people to root for, so is the audience.
Wilson is a convincing and solid presence as the person who knows what is going on, but is genuinely concerned and all about helping the family, nicely bolstered by Farmiga’s tenacious insistence in supporting him, despite knowing exactly what’s going on.
Lili Taylor is also a solid presence as the mother determined to protect her family.
Whether you believe in demons and hauntings in the real world is beside the point. Seen from a contemporary context the story offered about Bathsheba and the Salem Witch trials is iffy, slight and trite, but the story genesis becomes secondary to whether the scares feel real or not.
For all that director James Wan is considered part of the unofficial splat pack – a group of film directors including Alexandre Aja and Eli Roth who make brutally violent horror films – this one is less predicated on grossness and more on creating an intensely unnerving atmosphere and twisting up the tension.
A whole lot more is suggested than is actually shown, so by the time we reach the demon possession stage, the low-key menacing score and retro special effects have done the trick. Scary entities are played by real people, not computer-generated, and things that go bump in the night could just as easily be explained by a passing breeze as bad juju… or maybe not.
If you liked Insidious or Mama you will like this.
SHOCK DATES, SUSPENSE DOES NOT
ANYONE who has watched horror movies over the past 30 years knows these rules: Don’t go visiting a remote cabin in the woods with your four friends; get to know as much about the history of a house as possible before you buy it; avoid ones in remote places where people were killed and definitely stay away from houses built on ancient burial grounds. Most important, when something goes bump in the basement, grab the kids and leave.
And seriously? Who picks up the phone when the power has just gone out and there’s an electric storm raging outside?
While nowadays horror films tend much more towards thriller conventions, and aiming for a PG rating certainly takes the sting out of torture porn tendencies, there’s hope yet for lovers of true horror – you know, the kind that scares you more than it grosses you out.
James Wan’s The Conjuring, which opens on the local circuit today, is a homage to 1970s horror, not only because of the film’s setting but because of the way it meticulously builds up the tension and references the imagery and timing of what has gone before.
What other films have stood the test of time and will still give you the heebie jeebies?
• It’s just as well the animatronic shark in Jaws (1975) did not co-operate because that forced director Steven Spielberg to go all Hitchcock. He created suspense instead of relying on shock, thereby keeping his audience right out of the water and creating a classic.
Director Alfred Hitchcock famously explained the difference between shock and suspense to Francois Truffaut by describing two different scenarios.
Firstly take an ordinary scene – people talking, nothing special. Then a bomb under a table goes off. Fifteen seconds of shock.
Now, take that same scene but show the audience the bomb and then give us the bomb ticking down to nought as the characters blithely go on their merry way, talking away. That’s several minutes of suspense, right there.
• M Night Shyamalan does it with Signs (2002), slowly building up to the reveal of the bad guys and a finale that really pays off. Swing away, Merrill.
• Ridley Scott played the beginning of Alien (1979) really slowly, spinning out the story and creating suspense until, 55 minutes in, the alien bursts out of John Hurt’s chest, out of nowhere. Suddenly the audience realises that they have no idea what is about to happen next.
And, the best part is, the same thing does not ever happen again, despite the audience anticipating the next even-more dreadful thing they are imagining which should happen next.
Face it, what you can’t see makes it worse…
• In Silence of the Lambs (1991) the conversations are even scarier than the gore, though of course it’s the bad guy that everyone really comes to see. While opinion varies about whether Silence is a true horror or a suspense thriller, Hannibal is still one of the scariest villains ever, in any movie.
Silence teeters on the difficult line between psychological study and all-out horror, but succeeds because of the strong performances.
Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, Halloween, Cronos – everyone has their favourite horror film that conjures up their own scary memories.
But what they have in common is the directors all used suspense to draw you in and then scare you.