Thoughts on The Conjuring

 Well, what do you know? Right on the day after I finished watching the Wolverine I watch the Cnjuring with another friend of mine, because he wanted to watch it really badly, but his girlfriend was too scared to watch it with him. So I was his next pick.

So here I am! Finished watching the Conjuring, and about to write what I thought about this film afterward!  Check out my thoughts below the break!

Thoughts will be spoiler-free!

 The Conjuring follows a familiar format to many, many horror films. Family moves in house, house has “problems”, family tries to solve problems. However even with such familiar ground, the Conjuring is able to twist it in a way, and execute it so that while it is not yet up to the levels of amazing, it is still a very exceptional horror film, perhaps the best I’ve seen in quite a while.

Here is one of the twists that the movie adds, and personally one of the main selling points for me: There are paranormal investigators in central roles in the film.

Paranormal investigators are people that you don’t always see in horror movies, and the few times that you do, they are mostly side characters who attempt to help for a little while usually to no avail.

This is one of the most refreshing things for me about the Conjuring. These paranormal investigators are very much central characters in the film who have their own traits, and own qualities as opposed to a simple plot device like I mentioned prior. The main reason this is refreshing for me is because the paranormal investigators are people who know what they’re doing, and you can watch them try, and tackle the demon in the film through a fairly professional manner. It is very nice to see a horror movie cast who has some semblance of knowing what they’re doing as opposed to running about usually completely in the dark about what’s going on until the very end. It just makes the cast feel more competent at doing what they’re doing.

Even though the cast is comprised of a number of these sorts of people it does not cause the diminishing of the movie’s horror level at all! The movie is incredibly creepy, and understands the act of subtlety. While the movie may not be as disturbing as some other films in its “type” of horror, I can safely say that the film is good at just being plain scary in many parts. There are many moments in the movie which are simply hair-raising, and just make me NOPE! super hard.

I would’ve definitely liked seeing some more disturbing moments as opposed to plain scary to balance it out some which I feel would’ve definitely escalated the horror factor of the film even more. But that’s mostly personal preference.

There are jumpscares in the movie as well, but they are few, and far between, and executed well enough that I never felt annoyed by tem, and just took them as another successful scare.

The movie’s pacing is generally very slow, but I don’t mind that if I was invested enough into the movie to begin with. Question is was I? Eh, I’d say I kind of was, and wasn’t so while the slow pacing didn’t kill the movie for me, it may have just taken away from it just a tiny bit for me.

Something else the movie suffers from is that while it has added twists to the familiar format of this sort of movie it may have not done quite enough, particularly at the ending act of the film which kind of fell back to a more generic way of wrapping things up. If they had just pushed the boundaries, and deconstructed this just a bit further this would’ve been an amazing horror film.

Even with that being said the Conjuring is still the best horror film I’ve seen in a long time which was able to constantly genuinely scare me.