If I had to rattle off the best ghost stories of this century in some kind of The Long Walk challenge, I might actually win. I’d be unstoppable. Session 9, The Others, Pulse, The Ring, A Tale of Two Sisters, dozens and dozens more. All of those are from the early aughts, and that’s not incidental. The horror genre post-2001 became harder and more visceral, more hostile and confrontational, and the quiet, weepy scares of a good ghost story fell out of fashion in favor of nihilistic gore and in-your-face terror. Until 2016, at least, when James Wan’s The Conjuring 2 boldly claimed its spot as not just the best entry in the entire expanded universe, but also as a benchmark for what a modern ghost story should be.
In the almost-decade since, The Conjuring as a franchise has deservedly fallen out of favor with some audiences. When The Conjuring 2 was released in 2016, the cinematic universe had seen just one spin-off, the misguided Annabelle. With The Conjuring: Last Rites hitting theaters, the franchise now boasts nine different entries, ten if you include The Curse of La Llorona (which I do, because it’s silly not to).
So, there’s not only fatigue—this series, after all, adheres to a pretty rigid formula, and even the best spinoffs (Annabelle: Creation) can only subvert so much—but also a broader, meaningful understanding of the real-world implications. The series is unequivocally Catholic propaganda, Bible Camp in cinematic form, which might be innocuous if not for the pretty damning and criminal reality of the couple at its center, Ed and Lorraine Warren.
The Conjuring 2, to its credit, predates The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, arguably one of the most misguided horror films of all time, a ghost story that fictionalizes a very real, very complicated murder with all the pyrotechnics and horned demons you’d expect from the series. Ignorance was somewhat bliss with The Conjuring 2. But even still, what Wan accomplished with his sequel remains a gold standard for how to tell a really good, hella scary ghost story.
The Characters
Ed and Lorraine Warren are scum, sorry, but their cinematic counterparts, as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga respectively, are comfortably the strongest horror heroes we’ve had this century. While The Conjuring laid the groundwork for their divine devotion to not just one another, but those in need, The Conjuring 2 goes all-in, adding dimension, texture, and skepticism to the world-famous ghost hunters. They’re not only in swoon-worthy love (the karaoke scene is schmaltz but a treasure), but conflicted in their own ongoing pursuit of the ghosts and demons that hop from border to border.
Here, they’re late to the game. The Hodgson family, including single mother Peggy (Frances O’Connor), daughters Janet and Margaret (Madison Wolfe and Lauren Esposito), and sons Billy and Johnny (Benjamin Haigh and Patrick McAuley), is already in the midst of their haunt before the Warrens even arrive. Even then, clairvoyant Lorraine is unable to sense anything amiss about their home. Are they, as the media and Run Lola Run cameo Anita Gregory (Franka Potente) suggest, simply making it up?
No, of course not. But there’s viable, tangible tension in keeping the family’s salvation constrained for so long. More than that, it allows what Wan does best—tender, meaningful character moments—to flourish. This family is realer than most. Peggy and Janet pull most of the dramatic weight, and both deliver arguably some of the strongest horror performances of the century. O’Connor is no stranger to gravitas, and she easily conveys the hidden pressures and grief of beleaguered single motherhood. Wolfe is simply a knockout, a supremely sympathetic possessed kid. We’ve seen plenty in the horror genre before, but Janet is imbued with so much agency and curiosity that it’s nigh impossible not to grieve for her all-encompassing terror as the threats mount more and more.
Add some dashing Warren love to the mix, and Wan (and screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes, returning from the first) accomplish what the first movie couldn’t quite nail. This is a haunted house that places characters before scares. And when those scares do arrive, they’re ingenuously linked to not just Chekov’s Ghost, but earnest, heartfelt interpersonal beats, like a broken washing machine, that came before.
The Scares
Billy’s first encounter, courtesy of a toy firetruck, isn’t just a sensational jump scare (and make no mistake, The Conjuring 2 outpaces the entire franchise, including the first’s hide-and-clap), but a carefully plotted moment of character. Living in poverty, Billy’s upstairs tent is not just home to sinister happenings, but it’s simultaneously his salvation. He’s regularly bullied at school for a speech impediment, and within the cramped walls of fabric, he’s got what all kids wish for—an escape. A space to simply be himself without the mounting awareness of the world’s harsh realities.
My favorite of the bunch, a dresser that goes flying across the room mid-conversation, similarly augments character as much as it intends to scare. Peggy has had enough with Janet’s shenanigans, and as she’s tearing up a makeshift Ouija board, asking her girls to just stop, for once, the furniture slides from wall to door, solidifying their claims that something otherworldly is living in their house. I not only jumped, but it was thematically punctuated by Peggy’s impossible plight. Her subsidized housing is falling apart, she has no money, and now, very Dark Water-esque, she’s got a ghost to contend with, too.
Those scares find Wan at the top of his game. The camera pivots and turns, twists and zooms more than ever before. It’s a dynamic, living thing, certainly part of Wan’s trademark style, though perfected here. His scares, after all, conceptualize the best of hitting an audience when they least expect it. The stage is set, and as the camera lingers and floats, we know something is coming; we just don’t know when or from where. Jump scares are a science, and when done well, they’re elevated above cheap trick and instead, like all parts of what makes a movie a movie, a deliberate, creative choice crafted with care. Whether it’s a man’s booming voice, a specter appearing in the television set, or some nun’s hands reaching out for Lorraine, The Conjuring 2 earns each and every jump.
The Whimsy
Those scares are punctuated more this time around by Wan’s foray into whimsy. The Conjuring was pretty conventional, all things considered. It refined a formula, but its haunts were of the classic, ghost story variety. I’m often reminded of Alonso Duralde’s review from The Wrap: “The Conjuring doesn’t try to reinvent the tropes of horror movies, whether it’s ghosts or demons or exorcisms, but Fred Astaire didn’t invent tap-dancing, either.”
Conversely (and with a bigger budget to boot), Wan is more playful here. We’ve got The Crooked Man (Javier Botet), haunted toys, flooded basements, and, of course, The Nun (Bonnie Aarons), who would soon lead a franchise of her own. There’s whimsy and gothic playfulness, with Wan employing bigger pyrotechnics (plenty of extreme lightning strikes) alongside classic techniques like stop motion animation. What it lacks in the verisimilitude of the first, it more than makes up for in a kitchen sink of ghastly, ghostly ideals that all land with perfection.
It’s almost like Wan reverse-engineered the film, and the entire thing feels like an actual dollhouse, and our key players are being moved around and shifted pursuant to Wan’s whims. But his toybox is bigger and stranger than ever before, and no different than me moving my Godzilla action figure into my sister’s Barbie Dreamhouse. Wan is grabbing whatever he sees fit and finding a space for it inside the Hodgsons’ residence. Simon McBurney as Maurice Grosse is too fun for any other haunted house, though here, Wan relishes in the luxurious, mustachioed camp of it all.
Which is to say, yes, this century has plenty of classic ghost stories, and while The Conjuring is close, The Conjuring 2 wins out. It’s not only the best of the franchise (and a Christmas movie to boot), but the gold standard for how decades of horror history can be reworked into something new and frightening. This is a horror movie as a funhouse, just scare after scare with immense care innate in everything from setting to framing to design. It’s funny, terrifying, and since its release, unmatched. I haven’t seen a better haunted house movie since 2016, especially one so inspired by the classics, whilst simultaneously feeling like something I’d never seen before. It’s not a true story, but with what Wan and company accomplished here, call me Mulder and Scully—I want to believe.
The Conjuring 2 is currently streaming on HBO Max
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