the conjuring clap clap

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:

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”

…until now.

*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).