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In a movie age defined by endless franchises, there’s one genre that rejects the very idea of sequels. No matter how well written or well directed they may be, it’s next to impossible to make a good follow-up to a horror movie. But there’s one franchise that’s side-stepped the predictable trappings that have come to define scary sequels. The Conjuring and its four connected movies have been able to persistently deliver new thrills without ever getting too stale.
As Decider has covered before horror sequels largely don’t work because so much of the genre is reliant on the unexpected. A good horror movie dwells in the unknown, only revealing the threatening force at the very last minute. But the very concept of sequels eliminates this tension. You know that the next Saw movie is going to feature another group of people torturing themselves to save their lives, and you know that Halloween‘s killer is always going to be Michael. Sure, it’s fun to see more twisted deaths, but the original emotion is missing. The moments building up to a sequel’s revelation may be tense, but the twist is rarely unexpected.
That’s what The Conjuring universe, which will henceforth to be referred to as the Conjuring-verse, does so well. It lets its sequels stand on their own while embracing the quality control check franchises allow. You basically know what’s going to happen in every Conjuring or Conjuring-related movie. Someone will think a house or object is spooky only to be dismissed by everyone around them. Time after time that original person will be proven right, often to their own downfall. There will be jump scares, doors will creak, and the lighting will be strategically terrible. The whole paranormal package will deliver a perfectly good scary movie. But each movie delivers a different haunted movie with the same connecting players — demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga).
Instead of showing us the same basic premise we already know, movies like The Conjuring 2, Annabelle, and The Nun deliver new supernatural frights while delivering roughly the same level of horror. In a way, the Conjuring-verse is more like most television anthology series than well-known horror franchises. Each movie is allowed to tell its uniquely creepy story with Ed and Lorraine popping in to give this new movie the Conjuring-verse stamp of approval. These movies don’t make sense as part of a larger story because there really is no larger story. They’re just a series of vaguely interconnected tales that happen as part of two demonologists’ lives.
So far four movies connected to the original Conjuring movie have been released: The Conjuring 2, Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, and The Nun. A fifth movie, The Crooked Man, is currently in development, and there’s even been talk of turning the original film from a sequel into a trilogy. Critically these movies have been all over the place. Though the original Conjuring and its sequel earned an 86 percent and a 79 percent on Rotten Tomatoes respectively. Both Annabelle and The Nun earned scores solidly in the 20 percent range.
But then there’s Annabelle: Creation, a movie that was release five years after the original film that spawned this universe and earned a 70 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. How often can the fourth installment of a horror franchise stand next to its highly-regarded first two films?
Every time you go see something in the Conjuring-verse, you know exactly what you’re going to get — a fairly creepy horror movie that will deliver a handful of solid scares. In the unpredictable world of this genre, this sort of brand certainty is nice, especially when compared to the stretched narratives of the Saws and the Purges of the world.
