Pitchforks: 3/5
Rated: R
Released: July 19, 2013
Photo courtesy of FX.There’s an isolated decrepit house, flanked by murky water. The new people moving in, initially ambivalent of the hidden rooms and dilapidated interiors, take it in stride until some nasty ghosts break the peace.
Imagery like this is a genre in and of itself: the haunted house movie. People previously expired in the home from supernatural influences and are now a bit cross with the new occupants.
“The Conjuring,” the genre’s latest entry, which is based on true events, features the Perrons, yet another set of homeowners and their family of five, played by the reliable character actors Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor, under attack by entities beyond comprehension.
In their roles, they perform serviceably under the material, as any good middle-aged actor playing their part would.
Yet, the performances with the most verve occur whenever Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, portraying the real-life ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren, appear.
Farmiga conveys an unaffected exterior that hides the psychological toll clairvoyance grants her, from which Wilson tries to protect his spouse.
It also helps that their occupation gives a lot of texture to the usual scary movie; the Warren’s basement contains tainted trinkets from past clients that must never to be touched and details about the particulars of demonic possession.
The Warrens may be interesting, but most of the early haunting scenes aren’t particularly unnerving or terrifying.
After four years of insipid Paranormal Activity sequels, haunted house movies have defanged the market value of ghosts literally pulling the legs of the tormented and turned comedic.
Not that they were ever very frightening, especially considering that film riffs “The Amityville Horror,” a horror film made during a simpler time of jump scares.
The film professes to be based on true events, and the spirit proved such a malevolent entity that the Warrens kept it under wraps until now (or so the pre-titles scroll tells us).
This is in doubt by the time the demonic ghost goes into slasher-mode and threatens the Warren’s daughter.
All questions of validity and logic aside, “The Conjuring” is a well-made horror film.
What director James Wan lacks in set up, he compensates with assured direction of individual scares.
His greatest asset as a horror director is the inference of the unseen and lucid nightmarish images, such as when a daughter witnesses a ghost that no one sees in the corner, and, in one of the best visuals, when Lorraine, from her limited perspective, spies a ghost’s legs dangling from a noose in a basement.
Both he and cinematographer John R. Leonetti frame a handful of memorably unsettling images of this quality, but for every practical scary moment they create, a greater portion of the film falls systemic to the modern-day horror playbook.
This is the kind of type of film where a deafening jolt in the musical score punctuates each fright.
Too bad, because the dread and foreboding is where “The Conjuring” excels.
By the time the Warren’s arrive to investigate, the mental warfare waged on the household, which includes everything from inexplicable bruising all over Taylor’s body to late-night thrashings of family portraits, has them susceptible.
It succeeds in placing them on edge, yet not enough where those frayed nerves rub off on the audience.
And they are moments that resonate more at the end of the day than cheap scares.
Reach the reporter at tccoste1@asu.edu
