Prose and Con(juring)

This weekend, I went to see the new horror movie The Conjuring. (Oddly, my boyfriend and I got carded by the ticket taker, apparently because it was Saturday night, the kids were out in force, and there was a cop standing right behind him. It's surely not because I look under 18.)

The movie is the latest from director James Wan, most known for the first Saw movie, but who has lately (with Insidious) sought to make horror movies that operate on suspense more than gore. He's really swung hard in that direction here -- and that's generally a good thing.

The Conjuring is based on a real life husband and wife who made their careers investigating supposed paranormal phenomena. The stories of their investigations have been lifted and warped substantially into other films before, but this is the first time that the couple themselves were portrayed as characters on film. They're played by a skilled pair of actors, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson. The script puts more emphasis by far on the supernatural than on their characters' relationship, but even the presence of these two performers infuses the film with a notch of credibility.

The two are investigating the haunting of a family led by Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor. Again, these are two actors who are strong for their roles, though again, those roles on paper are fairly limited for the bulk of the film. (That said, Lili Taylor gets some meatier material to play in the film's final act.)

Where the film shines is in the way it ratchets up tension. As I noted earlier, there's very little gore in the movie; it aspires not to be gross, but to be truly scary. Generally, it's good on that front. It rarely relies on cheap startles that come from nowhere. Startles do abound, but they always come to punctuate a long scene of dread that you know is going to end with such a moment. There are a lot of clever set pieces that have you mentally screaming warnings at the characters not to do certain things.

But that said, the movie does take a little bit of time to get going in the beginning. Slow burns aren't necessarily a bad thing in a movie, but this movie isn't exactly breaking new ground. The haunted family conceit is well traveled ground in horror films. Even the haunted family in the 1970s is well traveled ground, thanks to The Amityville Horror (which itself was based on a case apparently also investigated by the ghost hunting couple). It's not that there aren't clever or semi-original moments in this film; there are. But it does take an awful long time for the movie to finally get to the place you know it's going.

I would also say that while the movie is often suspenseful, it's not often all that scary. There's been a lot of talk in the media about how terrifying this movie is, and how it received an R rating for nothing more than being scary. I'd say that's overselling things a bit, a marketing gimmick in the form of a rating. The movie is decent, certainly worth seeing if you're a horror aficionado. But I wouldn't go expecting it to be the scariest horror film in years (even if it is the least bloody).

Overall, I'd give The Conjuring a B-. Everyone involved knew how to weave a respectable, if not exceptional, horror yarn.

But as a footnote, what the hell is with that title? So far as I can tell, nothing is conjured in the entire film. It feels like they figured every other thing that sounded like a viable horror movie title had been taken, and this was the name they'd paid for already.