Article archive / July 1, 2016
Originally published: . Volume 7, No. 7. Source pages: 12.
by Alvin G. Burstein Though not a great film, The Conjuring 2 is artful in several ways. It shares with other spook flics the ability to stir widely shared but often half-buried dreads. In addition, it seasons the expected eerie and unsettling components with a huge dollop of saccharine. That second element works by drawing on the psychological element that self-psychologists call mirroring. Finally, the movie dances along the boundary between history and invention in an interesting way.
The film’s central characters are real-life demonologists Lorraine and Ed Warren whose website you can explore at http://www.warrens.net/. The Conjuring 2, as its title indicates, is a sequel to one which also centered on them, and in which they were portrayed by the same actors, Vera Famiga and Patrick Wilson. The Warrens achieved some notoriety because of their involvement investigating the haunting of a house in Harrisville, Rhode Island, chronicled in the 2013 original of the present film.
In that predecessor, the Warrens explore the site of a gruesome multiple slaying in a house in Amityville, New York in 1974. A year after the crime, the house was rented by a family who reported supernatural harassment that led them to flee the house, events alluded to in well-known 2005 shocker, The Amityville Horror.
The Conjuring 2 opens with a flash-back to a televised panel discussion in which the Warren’s claim of supernatural realities including demonic attacks are contested by the interviewer and a scientific skeptic. The flash-back continues with the Warrens’ exchanging descriptions of their fatigue and hurt by the attacks on their veracity and, perhaps, sanity.
The movie then fast forwards to Enfield, England, where a working class family is bombarded by poltergeist intrusions that escalate into physical attacks on the children and their mother. The family, terrorized and unable to convince others of their plight, appeals to their priest. The church, in turn, sends a representative to the Warrens. The institution is unwilling to intervene with religious rites such as exorcism, without objective documentation of demonic involvement, but is willing to pay the Warrens to investigate. Despite Lorraine’s feeling of unease, the Warrens reluctantly agree and journey to England, where they quickly get deeply involved in direct confrontations with the evil forces at work.
The Warrens find it difficult to earn the trust of the younger daughter, who has been the focus of much of the supernatural assault. Lorraine wins the child over by recounting her own feelings of deep hurt at not being believed, and her healing when she found someone who did believe her. The child asks what Lorraine did when she found that person, and Lorraine responds, “I married him.” She goes on to say “one person can change everything.”
The Warrens cement this effort to heal the family’s feeling of helplessness and abandonment by Ed’s calling a meeting to insist that they should stand together and not be bullied. He reveals his own struggles at not being believed, and the importance to him of finding someone who did believe him—his wife. His pep talk is well received, and he winds up playing one of the children’s guitar, singing Elvis’s I Can’t Help Loving You.
The homespun adjurations, buttressed by the Warrens’ acceptance of the family accounts, help the family reconstitute psychologically, evidence of the importance of what a Kohutian psychologist would call mirroring selfobjects.
The Warrens’ investigations provoke a crescendo of supernatural assaults, culminating in a materialization of the responsible demon. Its demonic attempt to kill Ed and the youngest daughter is foiled by Lorraine’s discovery of the demon’s name and her consequent ability to consign it back to hell.
The film ends with the exhausted but happy Warrens back home. Lorraine puts on a phonograph record and they dance together to Elvis Presley singing I Can’t Help Loving You.
Spook flics re-evoke childhood dreads of the dangerous and inexplicable, intimations of fears and feelings that adulthood walls off. They remain, buried, renounced or repressed, but still present, still powerful. Halloween is one institutional representation of their existence; the horror genre in books and film is another. Both offer an opportunity to play with this threatening material, keeping it at a safe distance.
Director James Wan’s frosting the macabre and morbid with sugar works well enough that we can, with reasonable confidence, look forward to The Conjuring 3.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.