The Conjuring: Hitchcock Would Be Proud

Hitchcock was first.  He was the one who essentially defined the horror genre.  He did it with pizzazz and with class.  His films were not bloody or gruesome or filled with foul language or nudity, they were filled with great characters, clever plots, and brilliant pacing.  And they were damn scary.  Then George A. Romero and John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven all entered the picture adding their own distinct brand of horror to Hollywood, each a little more violent than the last.  Soon, the nobility of Horror was becoming less and less distinguished.  Horror became buckets of blood and teenagers getting cut down after either having sex or running upstairs when they really shouldn't be.  Horror became the joke of Hollywood.  Never taken too seriously, and reproduced like little clones with minor defects that separate each other.  Then came the trump card (and I hate to say this) in M. Night Shyamalan.  Yes, he's lost all respect and credibility today, but when he released The Sixth Sense, the world of horror was re-examined by everyone.  Horror was no longer a joke.  Horror could be subtle.  It could be smart.  And it could be damn scary once again.  I personally think that his best film, and still one of the scariest movies ever made is Signs, but I know those who would disagree.  Shyamalan was our shot at the resurgence of good horror, but Hollywood, unfortuately, got the better of him and that tiny light at the end of the tunnel fizzled out.  But, he wasn't our last hope.

A little cheaply made film produced in 2004 came out entitled Saw.  It was different from the horror muck clogging the theaters at the time.  It was smart.  It was engaging.  It was pretty freaky.  And it was a great film.  It was made for almost no money and it spawned a gaggle of [terrible] sequels making studios tons and tons of money and giving a name to new director, James Wan.  After separating himself from his Saw baby and handing sequels 2-19 over to someone else, Wan was given free reign to direct other films.  His next film, while a respectable effort, was essentially a failure.  Dead Silence had a great, even scary premise but was poorly executed and miscast.  Wan could've easily been written off, but even though Dead Silence was not the horror hit of the year, it caught the attention of horror movie buffs around in it's homage to the older-style of horror filmmaking.  It wasn't overly violent or gory, but it had an aura of creepiness around it.  The creepiness, however, didn't end up giving the audience much of a payoff at the end.  Finally came Insidious, a complete and total throwback to the heyday of horror.  It drew heavily from the great horror films of the 60s and 80s, like Poltergeist and It.  It was able to scare the living crap out of everyone and still remain a PG-13 film that anyone could watch.  Yes, there were moments of definite cheese, but on the whole, if you were lucky enough to see Insidious in theaters, chances are you were significantly scared.

Now, with The Conjuring under his belt, it appears that James Wan is the savior of horror that everyone thought Shyamalan would be.  Let me begin by saying this: The Conjuring is a very scary film.  I love horror, I've seen many films, I know what to look out for and what to expect and it's fairly difficult to scare me, especially make me jump.  The Conjuring, while still being a definite throwback to Hitchcock faire, was able to defy all expectation and scare the bejesus out of me.  I'll put it this way: the film is rated R.  A significant amount of bad shit has to happen in a film to earn an R rating.  This one is rated R for literally being too scary.  There is no profanity, no blood, no gore, no nudity, nothing.  My 88-year-old grandmother could handle this movie if it weren't for the blood-curdling screams around her that might possibly send her frail heart launching out of her chest.  That sentence right there was more violent than The Conjuring, but it's so damn scary and outright disturbing that the MPAA had to deem it R.

The Conjuring tells the *cough* true *cough* story of Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), two paranormal investigators hired by Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor) and Roger Perron (Ron Livingston) in order to rid their home and family of the malicious spirits haunting the house.  The build up is slow, as it should be, giving us backstory on the Warrens as well as the Perron family.  We get subtle noises and bumps in the night that build towards shifting shadows, to bodies being thrashed about to the entities showing themselves entirely.  Wan's pacing is perfect. He establishes character, something most horror writers or directors have any interest wasting time doing.  There are so many characters in the film that each one ends up being haunted differently.  We care about each one of them and fear for their safety during each night.  The first hour is essentially filled with creepy music and faint noises, while the last forty-five go balls deep in to scaretown and it doesn't let up until the credits roll.  You'll walk out of the theater stiff from how tensed up you get watching the film.

There was a lot of research done in preparation of the film and Wan personally took it upon himself to make the film as "accurate" as possible.  Now, I'm not going to say what's true and what's not, because by saying it is a completely true story would mean for us to accept that evil forces are around and can take hold of us at any time.  Most people choose not to believe it, but some do.  Wan spent countless hours interviewing the actual family involved in the hauntings, hoping to make everything in the film as real as possible. Wilson and Fermiga are fantastic as the doubting Warrens who, over time, start to realize that the trouble may, in fact, be real.  Lili Taylor also holds her own as the mother who the spirits tend to like fucking with the most.  And what's great about Wan's style of directing is that he's able to scare us with plausible situations because these characters are real.  When something frightening happens, it very well could be happening in our own home.  He's smart in his execution as well.  He's not going for the cheap jump-scare with a loud noise or something popping up behind a mirror (though that isn't to say these moments aren't in the film), but the scares come organically.  They build on one another until it's hard to even breathe because anything could happen at any moment. 

The Conjuring is by far one of the scariest movies I've seen in recent memory, as well as one of the smartest.  It's the best movie of the summer so far and it's sitting in contention to be the best.  Anyone who loves to go to the theater and get scared will have a blast with this film.  Even those who are weary of horror films because of the amount of gore guaranteed to be present shouldn't worry.  There's nothing to be grossed out about.  It's just a good, old-fashioned fun at the movies that will be sure to scare the pants off of you.  I can't wait to see what James Wan has in store for horror in the years to come.

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