The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is a fictionalized telling of the 1981 Trial of Arne Johhson, a murder case where Arne Johnson plead not guilty by reason of demonic possession. Based on the film’s title and the trailers for it, you’d think this would be a hybrid horror film/legal drama where a God-fearing, upstanding lawyer tries to prove the existence of demons and demonic possession.
That would have been a much better movie than we get here. Instead of having anything to do with the trial, it turns into relativity straight-ahead horror film. The protagonists Ed and Lorraine Warren (portrayed by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) try to stop the demon possessing Arne (Ruairi O’Connor) and look for a potential Satanist who called the demon. It ends up coming across like a middling X-Files episode.
As an audience, yeah we can suspend our disbelief for a film, and go along for a while in believing in the existence of demons, demon possessions, occult Satanists, and weird spiritual warfare. But the movie needs to be really good if it’s not giving us what’s promised in the trailers. This movie is…bad.
The actual scares are fine, but everything out of every character’s mouth is the tritest dialogue. Even a great actress like Vera Farmiga can’t make this drivel interesting. And every twist is obvious from the beginning.
And for some bizarre reason, they really wanted to concentrate on the romance between Ed and Lorraine in this movie. It doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the movie, and again the dialogue is just atrocious.
And the general logistics of some of the scenes are infuriating. The heroes constantly research in incredibly dark rooms just because it looks spooky, anyone trying to actually read something would just turn more lights on. More egregiously, the movie’s finale takes place completely at night, when the characters had all day to do what they end up doing. There’s no explanation for why they wasted an entire day, it’s clear the filmmakers just thought a daylight climax wouldn’t be scary enough.
So, this movie doesn’t deliver on the interesting premise of its trailer. It’s a well-executed but completely predictable horror movie that we’ve seen hundreds of times before. If you’re in the mood for something like this, just watch any Twin Peaks or X-files episode, it’ll be more interesting. I’m rating this an HBO Go.