Horror Movie Reviews: 4 BEST Conjuring Movies

#1: The Conjuring

I’m not even going to talk about this absolute classic of a film. If this is not one of your top horror films of the 21st century then you are just a crazy person who irrationally hates jump scares…

Overall, the conjuring films are some of the best of this century so far. The original conjuring is an absolutely terrifying gem of a film that started a movement of films that tried for true atmosphere and scares, bucking the trend of extreme gore like Saw and Hostel. During the gore heavy craze of the late 2000‘s where films were trying to be more gross than the last Saw movie that was released, James Wan popped back up and did the completely opposite of Saw by releasing a movie with almost no blood, no guts, no sadistic torture and was able to earn an R rating by the MPAA for nothing but extreme terror. No gimmicks. Just plain scary.

#2: The Conjuring 2

For starters, the film doesn’t take place in some creepy old mansion in the countryside where the baroness of the land was murdered and haunts the halls of the sprawling mansion forever. Instead it takes place in the city, in a low income housing unit provided by the state and the ghost is just a grumpy old man who died in his sleep. This drastically changes the stakes for the victims of the haunting. They can’t just pick up and move to a new location and the ghost can't be reasoned with in the normal way. Usually a ghost wants you to uncover some mystery, find out the cause of it’s death or its purely malevolent in nature and just wants a soul. Old Man Bill just wants these damn kids to get out of his house and stay out of his chair.

Next is how the haunting actually works. The ghostly spirits in Conjuring 2 move their victims through space and time, transporting them to different locations within the house and defying the laws of physics and gravity as they do so. The main victim Janet is pulled off of her bed and through the floor where she finds herself dangling from the ceiling. The ghost transports her to a locked room and finally stuffs her into a wall. I can’t think of any other horror movie where the ghost has these powers. More than just the powers is the way the film conveys the possession. There is a clever scene where young Janet is asked to conjure up Old Man Bill for a little chat and in the shadows you can see her transform from a sweet young girl to a nasty old man.

The final thing they do and perhaps it’s the most interesting is they inject the human element into the film in a huge way. As much as the film is about the Enfield Haunting and spooky ghosts, it’s also about Ed and Lorraine Warren’s relationship, so much so that at times it feels like a romance film. Often horror films skip the part where you actually want to care about the characters but this film spends more time on that than the actual monsters and it’s fantastic.

#3: Annabelle: Creation

Annabelle: Creation is one of the most absolutely terrifying movies I have ever seen hands down. The atmosphere is thick, the scares are plentiful and the film does a fantastic job of going from a bit of a slow burn in the first two acts of the film with creaking doors and things hidden in the shadows to an all out screaming demon bit of insanity in the third act as Annabelle cranks her demon powers up to 11 and literally cuts people in half.

Sound design is a very interesting piece of the Conjuring/Annabelle Universe films, they often use audio to enhance the visual scares in unique and interesting ways. For instance in Annabelle Comes Home there is an awesome scene where Day After Day by Bandfinger is playing on the record player and someone knocks on the door. The record starts skipping and looping. The main character asks who’s at the door and the spectral entity says Annabelle and the music begins to warp and twist into insanity. In Conjuring 3 when Arnie succumbs to the demon witch it’s set to Blondie’s Call Me in a weird psychedelic, demonic twist, not to mention Patrick Wilson singing Elvis in The Conjuring 2. Annabelle: Creation takes this all a bit further as you can easily call it an ASMR film. All the dialogue is in hushed, whispered tones. Everything creaks, scrapes, hinges and whines as the main characters are hunted by the malevolent entity attached to the doll.

#4: Annabelle Comes Home

At its heart, this is a horror movie for kids. Sure it’s rated R, but so are all of the films in the Conjuring Universe but some of this might be a marketing ploy. Typically a film is rated R if they say the fuck word or show nudity, in fact there are tons of horror films that seem to have nudity or bunch of fucks just to get an R rating and avoid the dreaded PG-13 that the internet horror community hates so much. Annabelle Comes Home is completely devoid of all the R rated stuff that you would typically get with a film centered around two teenage babysitters. These baby sitters don’t get drunk, do drugs or engage in pre-marital sex. Instead, the babysitters just babysit the kid and bake her a cake.

There is a common misconception that just because a film is made for kids that it can’t be scary. Annabelle Comes Homes is absolutely terrifying for all ages and it has almost nothing to do with the creepy doll. You see, Annabelle is a conduit for evil/dead/occult shit and the Warren house is filled with evil/dead/occult shit and she uses her powers to bring it all to life and I want a spring off movie for all of it. There is a werewolf made of mist, a TV that projects the future, a haunted wedding dress, a haunted piano, a haunted game of feely neely and hell, there is even a haunted Samurai suit of armor although it’s entirely possible that Ed Warren thought it was cool and just made up some BS about it being haunted so he could take it home.