Is The Conjuring an apt title for this fairly prosaic but competently made supernatural horror? Who or what precisely is conjured? The demon Bathsheba – the name of the woman who in the Hebrew Bible was summoned by King David owing to her good looks, beginning a sordid tale of adultery and the early death by way of punishment of their first born – is already present, lying in wait in the basement of the dilapidated farmhouse in Harrisville, Rhode Island, after in 1863 she sacrificed her week-old child to the devil and swiftly hung herself from the branch of the big tree overlooking the lake. Bathsheba placed some unspecified curse over the land. She is not fond of visitors, much less of would-be residents, and going out of her way to make family life a living hell, she hardly needs to be conjured to make her presence felt.
Nor is an exorcism – of the type eventually carried out by Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson), husband to Lorraine (Vera Farmiga), the couple a pair of paranormal investigators – really a form of conjuring. An exorcism evicts a demon rather than calls one forth. But of course The Exorcist and Paranormal Activity were already taken, and Harrisville, Rhode Island would not have given itself to a series dependent upon the occasional change of locale. Lorraine Warren, who in the latter half of the movie repeats the refrain ‘it possesses the mother to kill the child’, unlike her self-taught husband works by means of clairvoyance, catching fleeting visions of demonic spirits and of the emotional histories of those she seeks to help. Alas The Clairvoyant, twice, and The Possession, just one year prior, had also already been had.
So The Conjuring it is then, and it’s a straightforward tale, set in 1971, drawing lightly on a wealth of horror flicks, The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror which also features the real-life Warrens, and a ream of other pulpish haunted house fare, without ever trying to evoke a narrow atmosphere or an authentic sense of the period. The Perron family move into their fully-furnished rural fixer-upper with their five kids, and after they stumble backwards into the boarded-off basement thanks to a game of hide-and-seek, things quickly start going bump in the night.
There’s what might count as a very minor twist when it turns out that the demon is trying to possess the Perron mother rather than one of the kids: the youngest, who through the reflection in a music box befriends a pallid-faced dead boy, and another who incessantly bangs her head while sleepwalking, initially seem like better candidates. The only really unsettling moment comes when a disembodied pair of hands emerges from the darkness with a clap.
From there the horror becomes a bit schlocky, and sometimes comic as characters get dragged about rooms, but when horror isn’t schlocky it’s invariably dull. Wilson and Farmiga are a couple you’re willing to get behind, smart and attractive without putting anyone to shame, and The Conjuring doesn’t try to do too much, developing patiently rather than forcing too many jumps, and unlike many films of this ilk, building a real sense of team spirit. If one of your family members were possessed by a demon, surrounded by these people it might even be kind of nice.
