Blu-ray Review: The Conjuring

(NOTE: You Tube clip and images not exactly showing up loud and clear? When you click on the link to read more, you’ll see them just fine on Rhino’s Horror)

Check out this excellent review of The Conjuring (including the features on the Blu-ray) …which Horror Boom agrees with 100%.  I actually lost track of the number of times I screamed aloud in panic. A handful of grown men in the theater got pretty vocal too, including one guy to the left opposite row from where we sat, who actually did a spit take when he made the mistake of sipping his beverage right before the wardrobe jump scene. At one point–I distinctly recall it was during the scene that took place in total fucking daylight where the Warrens played back their recording of the interview with Andrea and heard …well, what they heard instead of her voice… I began unintentionally squeezing the other half of Horror Boom’s (my husband) hand so tight he winced and decided to just put his hand on my arm instead. See, this is why I kept running into a brick wall a couple of sentences in when I sat down to write a review of The Conjuring after seeing it in a packed theater–the scares and mood were so visceral I still can’t write a traditionally-structured review*. At this point, anyway, I’ve resigned myself to having to say the hell with it and just ended up having to relate my various reactions to the movie instead.

As for the Blu-ray features, Ryan’s got them covered. The Conjuring Blu-ray is going on our Christmas list just for the “Scaring the @#$% Out of You” featurette alone. Be sure to give this a read! Not to mention, no spoilers. If you haven’t seen it yet but have been meaning to …what are you waiting for?

*I’ve had the same thing happen with several other horror movies– the French horror film Inside comes to mind as an example. Don’t get me started…

Seeing as how I never got the chance to review James Wan’s The Conjuring when it scared up theaters back in July, I figured a Blu-ray review only made sense. Hitting shelves on October 22nd, acclaimed director James Wan’s The Conjuring follows a pair of paranormal investigators who help a family haunted by a demonic force, only to find themselves trapped in their own horrifying nightmare. The film stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as Ed and Lorraine Warren; Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor as Roger and Carolyn Perron.

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Film Review: ‘Insidious: Chapter 2’

OK, we’re definitely on board! Variety loved it. Bottom line on our hopes for this movie: A. To find out what happens to the Lambert family next and B. a haunted-house thrill ride. Also, we could use a good James Wan-induced scream!

Check out the new Insidious Chapter 2 featurettes – just go  to the official site to see them all,  including some creepy ‘interactive’ features. You may not want to check them out alone in the dark with the sound blasting, though…

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When would YOU get the hell out of the house in The Conjuring?

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!

Renae Rude - The Paranormalist

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…

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The Conjuring – Ten Ways To Kill Time Until Your Showing!

(Insert some kind of “just hanging around to wait for the movie” joke of your own here; it’s probably funnier than any my sleep-deprived brain can think up).

Just a note here, it may not be the best idea to watch these after you get home from seeing the movie and you’re feeling tense and your nerves are jangled. I was feeling mellow when I made the mistake of watching…

1. ‘Vice’ and ‘The Conjuring‘ Present The 3:07 Project. Here’s the description: The devil’s hour, which takes place at 3:07 AM, is the most haunted time of the day. VICE and The Conjuring selected four directors to create short horror films inspired by that idea. Each one is distinctly twisted and scary.  

Strap in for the final two– especially the final short “The Last Dive,” directed by Jason Eisener. I deeply regret watching that after dark. Jesus! My heart lurched in my chest, I felt it distinctly.

2.  Read up some cool trivia, provided by yours truly, Horror Boom. The piece also has links to others, including the Warren’s Official Site and Museum of the Occult).

3. Check out Dread Central’s piece (and ‘black carpet interviews’ with cast and crew) on the star-studded premiere. We’re jealous (again).

4.  Not enough interviews with cast and crew, you say? Check THIS out from JoBlo.com- it’s exclusive, with Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson

5. Another with Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston (ScreenSlam)

6. THIS is a great one from Screenslam – Lorraine Warren and James Wan! (Part One)

Here’s Part Two. I keep hearing nothing but good things about Lorraine Warren:

7. Here is an extremely informative piece on the true story behind The Conjuring.

8. We have some video of On-set and BTS footage. You want honesty, I didn’t watch them because I strongly suspect they could by spoiler-ish. You can check them out now or wait till after the movie–as we will–to watch. Oh, and it’s HD. WARNING, POSSIBLE SPOILERS!

aaaaand part 2.(also HD). Looks like there may be some B-roll footage, so consider this a SPOILER ALERT!

9. You can try to figure out what the fu what the hell the story is behind this B-roll shot (that ends up in the movie):

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10. Poke around The Warren’s official site. It includes the Warrens Occult Museum (link here is for the FB page), with a TON of footage, reading, and discoveries (not all of them pleasant ones) to dive into!

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Plus, there’s a ton of pieces here on Horror Boom you may have missed. Just type “conjuring” into the Search Box at the upper right hand corner and it’ll give you everything.

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Couple reminders:

  • Don’t forget to bring your screaming voice, maybe some lozenges to soothe your throat with after the credits roll.
  • Either empty your bladder before the movie or wear Depends
  • If you have any spare Xanax lying around, you may want to bring one in the theater with you. Probably already in your tummy!

The Conjuring – Movie Review

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.

The Big Séance Podcast

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 (

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Brand New TV Spot for ‘The Conjuring’ Just Hit – With Some New Footage!

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!

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Sure, that house looks perfectly safe to live in...

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?

Six Chilling New Clips From The Scariest Film of The Summer, The Conjuring!

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).

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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’*.

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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:

The Conjuring -“The First Clap”
The Conjuring -“He’s Always Sad”
The Conjuring – “Getting Something”
The Conjuring- “Wardrobe”
The Conjuring- “Bedsheet”
The Conjuring- “Behind The Door”

 

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…until now.

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*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 movie The 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-On series).

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See Promising First ‘Insidious: Chapter 2’ Trailer: Hello Terror, (And Tiny Tim) My Old Friend

Whoo-hooo!

OK, straight up: I’m not sure how they’re going to explain away the fact that the first Insidious ended (Er, SPOILER ALERT FOR INSIDIOUS (2011)!!!! with Patrick Wilson‘s possessed character strangling Lin Shaye‘s character to death, after which it is established the (fucking terrifying) old woman in black finally got her hands on and her spirit into him – just NO RETCON, PLEASE, JAMES WON! That was one of the most awesome, chilling, clever endings I’ve seen in a long time. The icing on the cake was the smash cut to the title credit — when a horror movie does that BOOM! I’m OUT! drop-the-mic style ending, which was/is master of horror John Carpenter‘s trademark, picked up later by other horror directors who are clearly horror fans (example: Sam Raimi). This here horror fan has been known to spontaneously shout, “YEAH!” and burst into applause seeing a horror movie in the theater that ends this way, not caring whether or not the rest of the crowd joins in or not (as Mr. Horror Boom slumps down in his seat). OK, anyway, I’d buy it explained away as a dream. Lin Shaye is shown in the cast on the IMDB page, maybe CPR brings her back… oh hell, for now I’ll trust Wan. “Specs” and his partner are in the trailer –and the cast list on the IMDB page–too. Enough of my yakking, take a look at the trailer for Insidious Chapter 2 theatrical trailer above!

New Spooky-Ass Image/Poster from James Wan’s Insidious: Chapter 2 (BeyondHollywood.com)

Click on the big red link below to read more and see the awesome poster with the ominous tagline You Are Never Alone... oh, and there’s an image here we added, too.

Man, that poor kid has been through a lot!

 

New Spooky Image from James Wan’s Insidious: Chapter 2 | BeyondHollywood.com.

 

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Insidious: Chapter 2 will be released on September 13, 2013!  BRING IT ON, BABY!