By Daniel Janssen
Staff Writer
After the artfully creepy Insidious and the disgustingly interesting Saw, James Wan seems to have mastered the art of haunted-house horror. With his latest thrill The Conjuring, Wan adds a refreshingly intense film to the increasingly sappy horror genre.
Today, the only things that are supposed to scare you out of your seat in theatres are loud noises, cheap jump scares and mysterious notions of the film being “based on a true story”. By taking full advantage of the public’s expectations, The Conjuring will most probably be the first horror movie to make it to my list of favorites this year.
The Conjuring does what most horror movies fail to do in general. By the time the film hits the twenty-minute mark, you’re already on the edge of your seat. All horror films need time to build up to the “scary” half of the movie, but The Conjuring seems to disregard this norm completely. Wan has a keen eye for establishing tension and story simultaneously, a virtue rarely seen in (especially modern) horror.
Yet, Wan does not need much to set the scene. Relying heavily on eerily long shots of houses and hallways filled with the most unsettling of props, its content is relatively simple. Finally, someone has picked up the superior formula for creating tension – a recipe that seemed to have vanished from Hollywood: choosing practical effects over an abundance of computer-generated imagery, or CGI.
One thing is certain: The Conjuring is beautifully old school. The film is soaked in a dated, gritty atmosphere that I had seen last in older horror films like Psycho and the Chucky saga. The sets of Wan’s gem are loaded with everything from demonic dolls, to toy chimpanzees that stare directly into your soul. One prop in particular catches the eye: there seems to be nothing creepier in this film than a high-pitched string of sounds coming from a circus-styled music box. This small touch adds a surprisingly great layer to the movie, and not just musically.
With the use of these eerie tools, James Wan plays a clever trick on the audience, by using many slow panning/zooming shots to prepare you for a scare – bringing you to the edge of your seat – but purposefully not scaring you. By continuously saving its scares, The Conjuring builds a refreshing tension that hits you all the more when it is supposed to.
For the horror genre, Wan is a tad too ambitious. The structure of the story is just as challenging as its stylistic endeavors are; yet it fails to live up to the expectations that The Conjuring sets for itself. Consequently, the film feels unfinished, simply because it does not provide the needed answers to raised questions.
As odd as demonic toy chimpanzees and possessed music boxes might be, The Conjuring’s recipe for horror breaks away from the formulaic mess that the genre has become, making it one of the greatest horror films released after the millennium mark.
Daniel Janssen, class of 2015, is a Psychology and International Relations major from Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.
