my Movie

Movie Details

Title:   The Conjuring
Director:   James Wan
Year:   2013
Genre:   Possession
Times Seen:   1
Last Seen:   04.26.14

Other Movies Seen By This Director (6)
- The Conjuring 2
- Death Sentence
- Furious 7
- Insidious
- Insidious: Chapter 2
- Saw

Notes History
Date Viewed Venue Note
04.26.14Netflix So James Wan is a competent filmmaker again. I don't think I ever saw Dead Silence but I have to say that I hated Death Sentence so much that I sort of condemned him. Although this could've been called Insidious 2 (until a real Insidious 2 came out), it's still a very effective and solid horror movie with thrills and chills, both cheap scares and rich. I must admit that watching it in the middle of the night with the house completely dark and headphones cranked with my back to an open doorway put me on edge to the point where did stuff like slide one ear off to be able to hear house sounds, periodically look behind me, and turn extra lights on when I went into the kitchen for a drink. As much as I want to be saying this in a note for some classic movie like The Haunting or Poltergeist, I must admit that James Wan got me there with The Conjuring. I daresay this scared me more than the original Exorcist (which I don't hold much stock in).

The plot gets pretty extreme and kind of falls apart for me at the end (like most horror movies do) but not as much as Insidious did and it really could've been a lot worse. The quality of the cast certainly deserves a ton of credit, but again I must give Wan credit. The whole movie is so unabashedly horror. The score, the title roll, the setting and family and overall mood announces what kind of movie that it is and isn't afraid to admit its intentions. I'm so glad we've moved past the music video era of horror movies because now the lens filters are toned down, people care about performance again, and real stories backbone these movies.

This scared me and you can't argue with that.