The Conjuring

Genre: Horror
Rating: 15
Warning: Mild Gore, Suicide References

Despite being from the Director of Saw, an over-gory thriller, and Insidious, an amusing horror with silly elements, The Conjuring is a skillful and brilliant film.

Based on a true story of a paranormal case famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were involved in, we follow a family with five daughters in their new home. The home is haunted, and both items and people are possessed and used for scares by the malevolent being.

The scares are well executed, with build ups, fake outs and jumps that I found enjoyable. As a clever little break of the fourth wall, there are things shown to the audience that the characters cannot see, such as the "hide and clap" moment included in the trailer.

That moment is scarier in the trailer than it is in the film, but there are plenty of genuinely scary moments that are unexpected and jumpy. Even when they are slowly built up and strongly hinted at to the point where you're just waiting for them to happen, the jumps are not what and when you thought, and there are slow, calm scares. In an era where we're inundated with films that just throw gore and surprise at you without any substance, The Conjuring has slow, creepy images and sounds that scare without surprise.

There are red herrings, too; while some build ups lead to the scary outcome, some lead to false scares such as a suddenly appearing normal character, and some lead to nothing at all. This, and a nice balance between effects and characters (including a great build up to multiple characters in screaming danger in different rooms) this is horror that keeps you on your toes.

As well as this scene build up, the characters are well developed and build on. We slowly learn more about the characters and they do change because of the things they experience. Being based on real people can make characters flat due to avoiding slander or predictable due to audiences already knowing them. The depictions of Ed and Lorraine are a good balance, and add to my pre existing knowledge of the pair, whereas the haunted family could have been original characters. By the end, we care about them and what happens to them.

Satanism, witchcraft, murder and suicide make an appearance in the backstory and a horror-movie-typical overly-scary-looking version of the, in my opinion, far more terrifying real life Anabelle doll does in the side plot. Some very pleasant visuals on the top, and this is one of the best horror films of the decade.