THE horror movie Conjuring 2 had hit the cinemas and there was a lot of chatter as it was the scariest movie yet.
I heard stories of people changing their tickets last minute because some had been a bit too scared to even catch a glimpse of the show.
There’s a friend who’s still sleeping with lights on and his excuse was that the nun from Conjuring 2 was very scary.
That was enough to warrant a big screen viewing of director James Wan’s sequel to his 2013 film The Conjuring, about a possessed farmhouse in Rhode Island.
The first movie was perhaps one of the better horror movies to come along in a while.
I believe “The Conjuring 2” does everything you want a sequel to do. The story-line is as good as the original and the change of location from the US to England.
This movie is about the so-called Enfield Poltergeist, a very publicised story of a haunting which allegedly took place in England.
The story is different enough that it’s not just the same thing all over again from The Conjuring.
This movie builds up slowly. It’s another case from the files of Lorraine and Ed Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, reprise their roles from the first movie), the real-life couple who attained a certain fame as paranormal investigators from the well-known occurrences in Amityville, in the mid-1970s.
That investigation gets a shout-out at the beginning of this film, but the real focus is their work in 1977, the year after they visited Amityville, in the borough of Enfield in North London.
There, a single mother with four children reported bizarre, violent goings-on in the family’s home. The setting — Britain, public housing — distinguishes this film from the original, although with the exception of one neighbour there’s a curious indifference among nearby residents in this urban setting to the racket.
I for one did not find the movie to be that scary, the jump scares are well placed and those weak of heart please tread carefully.
What I also could not get my head around was how the Amityville demon found its way to England just to manipulate the lead character.
I also sensed a hint of Bollywood horror techniques used in this movie. Believe it when I say, that Hindi horror movies at times are more scarier than their Hollywood counterparts. In the Conjuring 2, you get that sense with the theme music and slow focus on each step a character makes going into a scary situation.
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are brilliant on screen as they are able to sell their characters pretty well, and a youngster named Madison Wolfe makes quite an impression as Janet, the child who absorbs the brunt of the poltergeist’s abuse.
Note that this is a movie, a work of fiction and its purpose is for entertainment only.
It is not a documentary. The characters of course discuss whether the haunting is real, that’s not what the director, James Wan’s intention was in making the movie.
As a horror director all he wants to do is scare and unsettle people, and believe me he was able to do so, judging by the reaction in the cinema and what others have been saying.
