New Release Review: 'The Conjuring'

The progression of a horror lover: age 7, get hooked on theme park rides; age 9, watch Jaws, try to unlearn how to swim, fail, decide to stay the hell away from any and all bodies of water; age 13, start on serial killer movies; age 16, discover the J-horror films, learn to sleep with one eye open; age 21, finally get around to watching the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, wonder if they'll ever be quite so freaked out ever again.

If, during your youth, you went through any of the above, you'll know every move The Conjuring is going to make. There are four and half months left in the year but I'd say the odds are good that The Conjuring will be the best not-remotely-surprising horror film you'll see in 2013. The story, supposedly true, details the traumatic experience of the Perron family, who made the slight hiccup of moving into a haunted house. The only slight wrinkle to the overly familiar haunted house story is that half the screen time is spent with the husband and wife paranormal investigators (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) who are talked into helping the family. The film reminded me of a well oiled TV comedy which follows the simple rhythm of 'line, line, gag, line, line, gag', only here it's 'build, build, scare, build, build, scare'. It knows how to tease out these moments, but none of them are in any way new. It's almost like James Wan, who previously directed Insidious and the mostly decent first Saw film, went through a checklist of horror tropes and wondered how well they'd work if they were all on the screen at the same time. If Wan had paired down the fairly large cast and fleshed out some of the characters a bit more then there would at least be an opportunity to invest in them. Instead, despite the film being 'Based on a True Story', no one feels real, they're just archetypes.

Part of me wonders if I'm being too harsh on the film. As a jaded horror fan, long LONG since desensitised, I can't appreciate The Conjuring for what it is because the tricks are so very familiar, but that doesn't mean the film didn't use them well. In fact I'm pretty sure it did, as the casting, atmosphere and pacing evoked the '70s setting - and the horror films from that period - perfectly. Maybe after each of us has watched three decades of horror films we should accept that what comes next isn't for us but for the next generation. I'm not sure that I really believe that's the case, but I do think there's a false nostalgia in the way we remember the horror films we grew up with. Our parents and grandparents probably have the same perspective, one generation having had Psycho, the next The Exorcist. Both sets could easily find themselves thinking that what came next pales in comparison. Maybe each of us just has a finite number of scares in us?

Overall:
For the jaded: 6/10
For the unjaded: 8/10