Review of The Conjuring (2013)
Seen in 2026.
A fictionalized account of the “Perron Family Haunting”, a 1971 case, portrayed here as if a demon made frequent, easily observable interventions in physical reality which the investigators catch on film.
The Exorcist (1973) was originally budgeted for $4 million and cost three times that to make. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $63 million in 2013 money. The Conjuring cost $20 million, which is equivalent to the original budget of the earlier film. In their pop-Catholic Christian worldbuilding and in their focus on girls around the age of puberty, the two films are almost identical. Here, the demon preferentially targets mothers rather than their daughters, but the psychological drivers at play are equally basic. The methods, however, are different.
The Conjuring pretends to be based on a true story, and it maintains a photorealistic style, but when it comes to the supernatural, its fictionalization is so extreme that it feels like a cartoon. The Todorovian marvellous is shown on screen so early and so regularly throughout the film that it is impossible to wonder whether the economic or the deeper psychoanalytical tensions in the Perron family could be the true cause of their troubles in this fiction. The true cause is obviously just a demon, which takes the edge off the psychological drivers. There is no Todorovian game here at all, but there is also no fantasy worldbuilding. All of the Perrons survive unscathed, because that’s what happened in reality, where there are no demons. As a result, the demons of this Christian fiction appear to be irrational and harmless despite their vulgar supernatural power. They are never interesting.
In the context of the fiction, the world around the Perrons continues to function as if demons did not exist. Faced with filmed evidence of the haunting, a priest qualified to perform an exorcism states that he can only do so with approval “directly from the Vatican”, on the technicality that the victims of the haunting are not baptized members of the Church. That is to say, the Church is not set up as if demons were its enemies. It is set up for the conditions of the real world. At the same time, the filmmakers are not afraid to lie about the true story of the Warrens, who investigated the Perrons. In reality, for example, the Annabelle doll from an earlier Warren case was a Raggedy Ann doll, while in this film, it’s a hard-shelled, scarier model: One of few nods to the Gothic.
There is a fairly consistent effort, following Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the real horror cinema of the setting’s 1971, to portray the two families as common people. To me, it’s an obviously bad idea to maintain that approach along with the Gothic, while making the supernatural presence as constant as in Night, without trying to do something new. Instead of breaking new ground, one of the investigators reminds the audience of what “the Trinity” is, because in the 40 years since The Exorcist, the audience’s belief in Christianity collapsed.