the conjuring 3: lesbian murderama

the other day, it came to my attention (much in the way that i assume a civil defence siren comes to a person's attention) that there is shortly to be a fourth installment in the conjuring series - although what i am referring to as the fourth installment technically also counts as the ninth if you include not only the central saga of horny christian ghost-ticklers ed and lorraine warren but also the surrounding conjuring multiverse of appended james wan styrofoam ephemera, including the nun, the nun 2, annabelle, annabelle comes home, how annabelle got her groove back and annabelle: the desolation of smaug. this fourth or ninth movie, titled as it is the conjuring: last rites, implies an ending that will never actually come to be, given that the conjuring movies have always been with us, and will always be with us, and will continue to be with us unto that sweet and certain day when the guys who directed alien: romulus rock up to reanimate the corpse of patrick wilson via generative ai in the name of making him say something he already said in the conjuring 2, only worse, and for no reason, and out of the side of a face that has been digitally rendered to look like the last fifteen minutes of the paris hilton remake of the movie house of wax. ah, cinema.

more than once, over the course of this blog's laboured and some would say unnecessary history, i have felt pressed to refer to the conjuring series as the typhoid mary of the breed of horror with which i am most intimately concerned. a series of movies so belligerently competent and yet void about the neurons as to pass for a specific type of wallpaper, the conjuring and its many spooky doll-based spin-offs operate on about the level one would expect from a pitch that presumably consisted of someone sitting down with a piece of a4 paper and carefully writing out the word "boo". these movies, invariably, look nice and come with relatively high production values and frequently feature two overtly stellar performances from patrick wilson and vera farmiga, both of whom you have to assume absolutely love this shit otherwise why on earth would they bother. and yet despite all this, the void at the heart of the conjuring series is palpable. it is a void which has long ago spilled into the hearts of many like-minded movies, all of which urgently want to scare an audience without first looking up the word "scare" or indeed "audience" or possibly even “an”.

the thing about the conjuring series, of course, is that it is horror for people who don't understand that it is sometimes necessary to be really fucking horrified. it is horror masquerading as a loaf catalogue, or a ffern subscription, or an instagram video where someone shows you how to get dressed. this isn't to imply that the conjuring series is overly aesthetic, but rather that its sheer inoffensiveness is the key to the almost insidious manner in which it manages to get absolutely everywhere. the truth, of course, is that horror movies are scary when the director is scared - when they are intimately concerned with the freak shit some mild-mannered bald guy in a canvas windcheater has been trying to get out of his system for fifteen years. what you need, at base, is someone saying welcome to my dark and twisted fantasy, which is why the conjuring movies are ultimately always such weaksauce, since james wan or the replacement bus service james wan is only ever saying welcome to my poolhouse can you tell me what you think it is people are scared of this season is it non-normative bodies again idk. one cannot make a scary movie when one is not even a little bit scared and glomming onto the broad strokes of horror via the medium of upside down crosses and disgusting old ladies hiding on top of wardrobes is never going to work in the way you want it to, because what's truly terrifying is always some highly specific shit.

anyway, in celebration of the fact that there will indeed be more of this garbage, and soon, please find below and for your edification the notes i apparently made on my phone on the occasion of watching the conjuring 3: the devil made me do it - a series of notes one has to assume i compiled for this blog and then forgot about, otherwise why would i have made them, unless the devil did indeed make me do it, in which case scratch the above.

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notes on the conjuring 3: the devil made me do it

nb notes are at points supported by explanatory commentary in italics, although this ought not to be taken as implication that the conjuring 3: the devil made me do it is a movie coherent enough to be readily explained.

nb the conjuring 3: the devil made me do it is a movie based on the real life 1981 trial of arne cheyenne johnson, in which the defence sought to prove innocence on the basis of demonic possession and in which ed and lorraine warren intimately involved themselves, because of course they did.

nb the conjuring 3: the devil made me do it commences at the home of the glatzel family, where ed and lorraine warren are about to film a young boy being exorcised.

- what is it about these movies, why does everyone in them always look like they're headed to a costume party titled "seventies!"

- oh look, that kid is played by the kid who played young luke in hill house. what is it with these horror kids, why are there only six of them and why is this all they do. where are they being kept. what's their deal.

nb at this point we zoom out to see a priest arriving at the house in arguably the most hackneyed call-out to the movie the exorcist (1973) yet committed to film.

- you can definitely see the increasing scope of this movie's ambition, misplaced though it is, given that 1 was apparently the amityville horror and 3 is now the exorcist.

- interesting that in both cases it's unclear whether james wan has actually seen the movie in question, or just the poster, since that's all he ever seems to want to recreate

nb the small boy is now exorcised, in the presence of ed and lorraine warren.

- it's horny that they're always wearing matching shades of plaid

- oh wait ed had a heart attack

nb at some point during all this the opening credits run.

- why are these movies called the conjuring. does anyone do any conjuring in them. is this ever explained.

nb ed survives and the demon in the small boy now transfers to arne, who i think is the small boy's sister's boyfriend, although i couldn't swear to this. demon!arne murders his landlord. the warrens get involved in his choice to plead not guilty by reason of demonic possession. it transpires that someone has been leaving demon sigils or something at the glatzer house. at some point, the actor john noble turns up, and it is immediately evident that he is up to no good because he is the actor john noble.

- oh look it's denethor of denethor's grim dinner fame

nb because the movie badly needed padding, it now becomes a weird procedural for thirty minutes, during which it becomes apparent that a random unrelated lesbian was also possessed by the same demon and consequently killed her girlfriend in the woods. at various points in this movie, people will become possessed by this demon and refuse to kill their partners, because of the power of love, but this does not appear to apply to lesbians.

- these movies really said familial love and straight love will redeem you but lesbians gotta stab and that is just biological destiny

- i have no excuse for how camp i find these movies given how demonstrably homophobic they are but i just think they are so uncompromisingly horny that that makes it gay

- ed just said "d'you remember what you said on our wedding night" and lorraine just said "can we do it again?" and ed just said "no after that" and lorraine just said "oh you said god brought us together for a reason". like ok calm down.

nb anyway back to the actual plot and at some point ed and lorraine are attacked by morgue zombies but i really can't remember why. then they return to their home which, in case you have only just arrived, includes a cute little room where they keep all of the cursed objects they have collected on their travels and in which ed appears to spend a lot of his time indulging in his preferred hobby of painting nuns.

- people are repeatedly like ed doesn't it worry you to have a haunted room and he is such a chad that he is like no and then people are like doesn't it bother you to constantly be painting demon nuns and he such a chad that he is like no

- ed warren takes unbothered to a point of clinical negligence

- then again i guess if you were stacked like patrick wilson probably so would you

- relatedly idk if you have googled ed warren lately but the casting in this movie is probably the most egregious case of mischaracterisation since shakespeare in love and i think that is fine

nb i can't really remember what happens next although ed and lorraine and their pals spend an interminable segment trying to figure out whodunnit via the process of sticking things to a corkboard, until it is dark and evil afoot.

- the reason it got dark is you spent all day decorating a board

nb it turns out that the actor john noble is evil, which we already knew, but also that actually he's not exactly because it's really his daughter, who is i guess living in some tunnels under his house and summoning demons. the daughter uses the demon to try to get ed to kill lorraine, but he doesn't do it.

- because of heterosexuality

nb then ed and lorraine kill the daughter and get out of the tunnels via a well or something. the movie ends with ed buying lorraine a bandstand of some kind?

- it's actually a gazebo

ok fine.

nb arne who we have mainly forgotten about serves five years for manslaughter.

- and that's the conjuring 3