The Conjuring

The Conjuring is a skillfully made horror film, but it doesn't raise any bars in the genre, and I don't think warrants the praise that it got upon its release last year. Really, it's just another exorcism film, and quite unfair to witches.

The setting, a remote New England farmhouse, is also hardly unique. This is based on a "true" story (the quote marks are my own, since I steadfastly refuse to believe in demons), a case of real-life ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren. They are played earnestly by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.

The family in trouble are the Perrons, with dad Ron Livingston and mom Lili Taylor. They have five girls and a dog, but we know things are bad when the dog won't enter the house.

I was bothered by certain things right away. Who buys a house and doesn't know it has a basement, especially when the basement has windows? Who walks around a house they're not familiar with it, blindfolded? And why does Taylor react so calmly when she starts getting mysterious bruises all over her body?

When things start escalating--doors opening and closing on their own, weird noises, the smell of decaying flesh--Taylor tracks down the Warrens to investigate. They immediately sense something is amiss, and research the house. Turns out a woman, related to one the Salem witches, murdered her baby and hung herself, cursing anyone who would take her land. Residents have been committing suicide since then. Now, I am not a witch, but I know that witches are not connected to Satan, as they are here, and those executed at Salem were completely innocent. I hope if there's a witch anti-defamation league they looked into this.

Taylor ends up getting possessed and Wilson has to perform an exorcism, even though he is not a priest. There's nothing about these scenes that are new are original, dating back forty-one years to The Exorcist. The film is extremely Catholic, also, with an epigraph of Warren stating that demons, the devil, and god are all real. If you say so.