The Conjuring: Big Haunts

Making a really good horror movie is hard. It's so hard that we're averaging around one per decade since 1980. For those keeping score, that would be "The Shining" (1980), "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) and "The Orphanage" (2007). Most horror films suffer pretty hard in the hands of critics. Sometimes they deserve it, but mostly I think EVERYONE SHOULD STOP PICKING ON HORROR MOVIES; NO ONE'S TRYING TO BE CITIZEN FUCKING KANE HERE, SO HOW ABOUT WE SAY NICER THINGS ABOUT THEM, HUH?!?!

...sorry. I love horror movies. Ghosts, ghouls, haunts, anything remotely Halloween related? Awesome. It's important to acknowledge the bias. And seriously, doing horror well is art. Other genres evolve more naturally. Action movies benefit from technology making it easier and easier to put visually spectacular stuff on screen; same goes for sci-fi and fantasy. Making a passable love will be easy at least until we exhaust Nicholas Sparks' body of work. Dramas will always be able to trade on their lead performers.

The point is there are slews of movies in most genres that are just okay to good to great. Hitting the just okay threshold in horror is much more difficult. There are two reasons for that. The first is that horror is an incredibly bankable genre. You can make a mediocre movie for a few bucks and it will get you a profit (see: every long lasting horror franchise ever). It's just too easy to get lazy.

The second is that to scare people, really scare them in a way that matters, you have to tap into something primal. You have to produce a story people can bite into around the edges of their fight or flight response. You need enough gravity to draw people toward a dark center they might otherwise wish to avoid.

Oh yeah, "The Conjuring"! Let's talk about "The Conjuring". This is by no means "The Silence of the Lambs" for the new millennium. But it is really, really good.

The premise--family moves into a haunted house, shit goes bananas/creepy--is tried and true, but in James Wan's ("Saw", "Insidious") increasingly adept hands, it works. The characters, fleshed out enough that you give a damn, the creeping pace of the story, even the look of the house itself, which screams "Ya'll are about to have a fucking ghost problem!" are all spot on. But what really makes "The Conjuring" so strong is that the haunting, the fear, is always at the film's center.

The way Wan makes the fear hover in every scene, turning up the volume on the scares with masterfully flexible timing, gives me hope. There might be a great horror film in this man. Every movie he's made (well, maybe not "Dead Silence") has been better than the last. Casting Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson shows an improving eye for character to go along with his gift for telling layered, haunted, creepy-ass stories.

"The Conjuring" is worth your time. It's good. A little too derivative to be great, but it's worthy of borderline outlandish (for a horror movie) RT score. My hope is that this is only a warm up. Come on, James Wan, MAKE SOMETHING INCREDIBLE.

Directed By: James Wan

Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, the guy from "Office Space", Sarah Kendrew

You Should See it if: You're not a stupid jerk who thinks horror movies can't be good, which is totally unfair. Jerk.