A very valid question! Yeah, I think the birds would do it for me (if not before then). Take the quiz (but beware of MAJOR spoilers if you haven’t seen the movie yet – and if you haven’t, we highly recommend you do)! By the way, take some time to check out Renae Rude’s amazing blog, The Paranormalist — recommended, and often creepy, reading!
Nearly every haunted house movie begins the same way – a middle-class family invests every penny they have in an old fixer-upper. There is a married couple, a child (or children,) a cat and/or a dog. There is often (though not always) something a little dysfunctional or unusual about the family. Communication is these families is usually spotty at best. The husband and wife don’t confide in each other. The parents ignore unusual behavior by the kids or the animals, and don’t give credence to anything odd the kids say. The family is full of hope. It’s a brand-new, high-stakes, fresh-start for everyone.
Then bad things start to happen.
Ogre and I just got back from seeing The Conjuring. It’s a great movie in many ways, destined to become a horror classic.
But …
I could not help but ask myself the same question I always do when I see another…
A different kind of nightmare caused by The Conjuring. Not cool, whoever is doing this. If it were our house, we’d probably dress up as Bathsheba, get on an upper floor, and then wait until they got juuuuust close enough and then leap out at them, setting off some ear-splitting blaring siren off at the same time. OK, actually, that’d probably be counter-productive (but it would be fun if you had gotten really fed up). Let’s hope anyone curious is respectful and just pays a visit from a respectful distance.
With all of the success and hype surrounding James Wan’s The Conjuring, you knew something like this was going to happen eventually. In a recent article on Woonsocket Call, it has been revealed that the current residents of the Harrisville, R.I. home are being disturbed by fans of the movie who want to take a peak at the house that inspired the film.
“We haven’t slept in days,” Norma Sutcliffe told The Call. “Because we wake up at 2 in the morning there are people with flashlights in our yard. People call on the phone and ask “is this ‘The Conjuring’ house?” I can imagine that being pretty damn annoying. Obviously there’s really no harm in being curious and wanting to see the house that inspired it all. Hell, I myself went and checked out the Amityville Horror house a few years ago that I admired from a distance…
Starring Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Ron Livingston
When Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga) agree to help a distraught family claiming their house to be infested with malevolent spirits, they are unaware that the case they are about to undertake will be the most challenging and distressing of their eventful, tumultuous careers as paranormal researchers. Similarly, when I as an audience member originally intending to see low-brow comedy This is the End changed my mind at the last minute and bought a ticket for The Conjuring, I had no idea just how much my heart was going to be very unimpressed; as it was made to work overtime for nearly the entire 112 minutes…
Having helmed the decade-defining Saw (2003), creepy and atmospheric Dead Silence (2007) and the often terrifying thrill-ride Insidious (2010), director James Wan has established himself as Australia’s premier Master…
Thanks, Patrick, for sharing such a great review. I’m pretty sure my husband (Mr. Horror Boom–though I’m the horror superfan in the family) ALSO wishes you lived up here in our area, since I’m going to have to pay for his ticket and STILL drag him to go see this with me (especially if there’s a Thursday night preview) like I did with, oh, Insidious, Sinister, Mama, and many others! Lili Taylor blew her voice out screaming? That’s not a huge surprise (poor woman). Uh-oh… my voice was pretty scratchy for 24 hours after seeing Mama in the theater. Oh, and I hear the cast are all wonderful, but that Vera Farmiga more or less steals the show acting-wise.
First of all, if you are a fan of this genre of film, YOU MUST SEE THIS MOVIE! You WILL see this movie! (Although… some of you may want to see an afternoon matinee so that when you leave the theater you can go to a park, watch the bunny rabbits play, and soak in the last hours of sunlight before you’re home checking rooms and corners.)
Okay, now that I have that out of my system, we can get to the review and the details. Last night I attended an advanced screening of the much anticipated film, The Conjuring, starring Patrick Wilson (Insidious, Evening), Vera Farmiga (A&E’s Bates Motel), Ron Livingston (The Odd Life of Timothy Green), and Lili Taylor (The Haunting, HBO’s Six Feet Under, and TV’s Hemlock Grove). The film is directed by James Wan (
Sorry to make this so brief; technical issues on our internet access WAAAAY too long today. So, this is TV spot #3 for The Conjuring. And we believe all the rave reviews!
We’ve got plenty more Conjuring-related material (some of it pretty, well, juicy) coming up, so hang in there!
Sure, that house looks perfectly safe to live in. I know it’s a horror movie, but you might want to, oh, I don’t know, TURN A LIGHT ON, dudes?
“Perron’s description of Bathsheba is where things really start getting creepy because she describes the spirit’s face as having almost no real features. Instead, it looked like a lifeless beehive with vermin crawling all over it. “Its head was leaning off to one side. It was round and gray, resembling a desiccated hornet’s nest. I couldn’t see anything underneath it… no eyes or mouth…it looked like the cobwebs hanging in the corners of the cellar.” This, as described by her mother.”
Jesus! I’d just sleep in my fucking car until we could find another house to live in… parked a couple counties away. Anyway, read this article for more disturbing details about the real-life case –also known as the Harrisville Haunting, or The Perrone House Haunting, that inspired upcoming nightmare put to celluloid, The Conjuring (opening on July 19th… NOT SOON ENOUGH FOR US! There’s lots of great video with interviews from the real-life Perrone family included in the piece… recommended while you wait for the movie to arrive.
James Wan’s latest foray into the haunted house genre leads him straight into The Conjuring, a film “based on a true story” about a family that was terrorized by demonic entities in which ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren were called upon to investigate. Many movies are based on some truth, and when it comes to something as terrifying as The Conjuring, then naturally we want to dig deeper into the events that inspired them.
Doubt that we’re going out on a limb (so to speak) when we predict James Wan‘s The Conjuring will have you screaming louder than anything else you see in the theater this summer (notice we didn’t say ‘this year’ – Mama came out in January, so we’ll reserve judgement on that).
We wish we could embed these here, but so far the clips are only up on the slightly clunky Movieweb.com site. We have links for you, however… and an image or two. Brave enough to watch these after dark with the MUTE button off? We weren’t, and still had our heartbeats sped up at the jumps AND the ‘fridge scares’*.
Hopefully your browser won’t be as buggy as ours was with MovieWeb, and the clips will show up on YouTube soon. We’ll embed them when they do. Until then, you still don’t want to miss these six (six six)! Here’s the links:
*We’re pretty sure you can understand our complicated lingo, but even Mrs. Horror Boom didn’t know the terminology for ‘fridge scare’ until a couple of years ago, so here goes. “Jump Scare” you don’t need a definition for (if so, see: Ellison in Sinister deciding to see what’s on the 8mm reel marked with the title YARD WORK. I almost fell out of my fucking theater seat like Ethan Hawke‘s character in the movie). A fridge scare (and I’m not sure who coined this term) is closer to a chill than something that causes you to scream in panic, and usually involves quickly putting two and two together (if it takes you a few scenes to put things together, that’s closer to a reveal, such as a main character finally seeing photographic evidence of why his neck has been aching for most of the movie–movie title removed for spoiler reasons). Classic example: in classic ghost movieThe Haunting (the 1963 film, NOT the shitty remake), a character is in a dark room, unable to sleep because she’s staying in a clearly haunted house, comforted by her friend holding her hand next to her. When the hand holding starts to get too tight, she turns on the light… to see her friend across the room. In bed. Asleep. Done right, as in the scene in the first Conjuring trailer where Valerie is playing clap-clap hide-and-seek with her daughter, and two hands come out of the stand-up wardrobe, but she finds nothing there, only to take off her blindfold and see her daughter walking in the room, the viewer feels a cold chill run up their spine. These take more skill to pull off than just suddenly blasting a loud noise to make the viewer jump (especially if it turns out to be a false alarm, like a cat leaping out …unless, of course, you’re watching anything in the Ju-Onseries).
Roger Perron: …he says, keep the lights on in this house at night. A couple nights later, it came back to me, and I had an idea that something was wrong…
Oh really? Yeah. VERY wrong. Any scenario involving THIS creepy-ass doll isn’t going to be right:
Check out the brand-new trailer (note: this is the UK version, because every other version featured at least two distracting pop-up ads) for James Wan‘s The Conjuring, which features not only new footage from the movie, but footage of the actual Perron family, below:
OK, so that might mean we know in advance all of the home’s residents survive the movie, but for most of us, that isn’t going to damped our enthusiasm for a movie that the MPAA rated R rather than the PG-13 the studio (and Wan) were going for, due to the intense scariness and disturbing tone rather than violence , gore, sex, or saying “fuck” more than once (which the movie does not).
The official website is up and running (we suggest you turn the sound off if you check out the menu after dark and you’re feeling jumpy) and gives this official info…
Before there was Amityville, there was Harrisville. Based on a true story, “The Conjuring” tells the horrifying tale of how world-renowned paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were called upon to help a family terrorized by a dark presence in a secluded farmhouse.Forced to confront a powerful demonic entity, the Warrens find themselves caught in the most terrifying case of their lives.From New Line Cinema comes a feature film drawn from the case files of married demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. “The Conjuring” stars Academy Award® nominee Vera Farmiga (“Up in the Air,” “Orphan”) and Patrick Wilson (“Young Adult,” “Prometheus”) as the Warrens, and Ron Livingston (HBO’s “Band of Brothers”) and Lili Taylor (“Public Enemies”) as Roger and Carolyn Perron, residents of the house.
Joey King (“Crazy, Stupid, Love”), Shanley Caswell (“Detention”), Haley McFarland (TV’s “Lie to Me”), Mackenzie Foy (“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn”) and newcomer Kyla Deaver play the Perrons’ five daughters, and Sterling Jerins (upcoming “World War Z”) is the Warrens’ little girl, Judy.
Nancy? It’s …standing right behind you…
James Wan (“Saw,” “Insidious”) directs from a screenplay by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes (“The Reaping”). The film is produced by Tony DeRosa-Grund, Peter Safran and Rob Cowan, with Walter Hamada and Dave Neustadter serving as executive producers. Reuniting with the director are members of his “Insidious” creative team, director of photography John Leonetti, editor Kirk Morri and costume designer Kristin M. Burke, and his “Saw” production designer, Julie Berghoff. The music is composed by Joseph Bishara.
Fuck!
As we’ve raved before, we’re already sold (whether the story it’s based on is true or not) and hope to catch the movie on July 19th, opening night… if we can’t get into a sneak preview before then. We’ll be posting everything new we can find ...and it looks like that R rating is a sure thing. (HELL YEAH!)
Footnote: After contemplating the vague, nightmarish tagline/phraseLOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO at the end of the trailer, maybe a matinée (on a cheerful, sunny day) will do it for us…
We were trying to keep our expectations mediocre on this one (notice the word “trying” as opposed to “achieving”) but oh MAN, it’s gonna be hard after reading this review! Plus, the last ghost film we saw rated “R” not so much due to gore but scariness significantly impacted our ability to sleep. Cannot wait! The Conjuring opens in theaters July 19 (and Horror Boom has the countdown widget for all of us to check compulsively).
HORROR BOOM 