Sunday, July 28, 2013

Movie Review: The Conjuring

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might wonder why I didn’t see this last weekend.  Horror movies are my guilty pleasure.  I love watching them, love getting scared out of my gourd.  This movie, brought to you by the makers of Insidious, delivers several knock-out blows before leaving you with your eyes covered.

Based on a true story, the movie takes us into the lives of real-life paranormal experts, Ed and Lorraine Warren.  The story is set in 1970 when Ed and Lorraine had been working for some time, trying to legitimise their efforts by speaking all over the area.  The duelling story with theirs is a family that moves into a new house and the very first day, strange things begin to happen.  The house is old and the price was just right.  The father is a truck driver and isn’t home all the time and the mother stays out home when four out of five girls go to school on a daily basis.  The scares start small, a creaking door here, a strange new imaginary friend there, the action ramping up effortlessly.

If you’re familiar with any sort of haunting or horror movie, the story revolves around a problem and the solution to the problem.  Like clockwork, the action escalates, forcing those affected to change their behaviour or lose a loved one.  The slight twist to this story was seeing the inner workings of the Warren family.  It is presumed that they are experts, but few get to see more than the snippets given from haunting-type shows.

The movie does an excellent job of making small things terrifying and playing on the innate fears of the movie-goers.  Many of the scariest movies aren’t gory or have someone running at the camera, but use little elements to make you wonder what is going on.  There was a perfect scene early in the movie when the mother walks down the stairs first thing in the morning and finds the clock set to a time I didn’t see.  The scene moved so fast, but the action was subtle and when I saw the next clock, I knew what had happened.  Less is often more and this is the case with this movie.  The Conjuring was a fairly well-told scary movie and well worth seeing.

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