The Conjuring 2

I guess it’s time to review The Conjuring 2, the second movie in the James Wan/Warner Bros franchise that’s turned into the MCU of horror movies. In case you’re not familiar with them, the Conjuring movies are about proven frauds Ed and Lorraine Warren, but in the movies they’re actual ghost hunters instead of con artists who scammed mentally ill people. The Conjuring 2 opens with them investigating the Amitville haunting, which was a hoax, and then moves onto the Enfield haunting, which was also a hoax.

Hang on, I need to drink some water. Things got a little spicy there.

As I stated, The Conjuring movies take place in a fanciful alternate reality where all of this was real and no one was bilking anyone out of their money or running obvious scams for media attention (glug glug glug). While investigating the infamous Amityville case Lorraine, the psychic of the duo, has a vision of Ed’s death that involves a spooky demonic nun. Meanwhile in England, a girl named Janet Hodgson messes around with a home-made ouija board and accidentally draws the attention of a malevolent ghost. Despite Lorraine’s premonition that Ed is in danger, the Warrens become involved when the Enfield haunting turns into a case of full-blown possession.

If you’ve seen the first Conjuring movie--or any of these James Wan-adjacent horror movies, if we’re being honest--then you’ll know pretty much exactly what to expect here: lots of repetitive night time scenes where people are drawn out of their bedrooms by spoopy noises, extremely overt ghostly activity of the sort that it would be very easy to capture on video if one were so inclined, the Warrens do their paranormal investigator thing, and it’s all capped off by a big dramatic climax where someone gets possessed Exorcist-style. Oh, and jump scares. Lots and lots of jump scares, because at the end of the day all of these movies are the cinematic equivalent of funfair haunted houses.

Which is a shame, because when it isn’t throwing plastic skeletons at the viewer and yelling “A-BOOGA-BOOGA” the movie, like its predecessor, is capable of pulling off some really effective subtler scares. There’s a particularly nice scene involving the nun that manages to be chilling despite taking place in broad daylight, in an ordinary well-lit house.

But that scene is also emblematic of the movie’s biggest flaw, which is that it’s trying to tell two stories at the same time and doesn’t juggle them gracefully. On one hand you’ve got the Enfield haunting, which is a nice straight-forward ghost story about a haunted house, and then you’ve got Ed and Lorraine being stalked by this demon nun that latches onto them out of nowhere, and which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the first plot thread. The nun then ends up becoming the main villain of the movie, and the ghostly old man who’s been harassing Janet quickly fades into irrelevance so the Warrens and their epic battle against the forces of evil can take over.

The reason for this is fairly obvious: at this point Warner Bros had already found success with the Annabelle spin-off series, so it seems like there was a corporate mandate for future Conjuring movies to include new characters that could headline their own spin-offs. I guess no one thought that Grumpy Old Man Ghost: The Movie would get people into cinemas, whereas the demon nun seemed like a more bankable prospect (they appear to have been correct, as The Nun ended up becoming the highest grossing movie in the franchise so far).

It’s unfortunate, because if the movie had stuck to the Enfield haunting it could have told a pretty compelling story about a working class family pushed to the brink by financial pressure and family strife, with some nice ambiguity over whether the haunting was real or some sort of coping mechanism on Janet’s part. Instead we get a promising concept squandered on the usual over the top cavalcade of loud noises. I say “boo” to this, and not the fun kind of boo.