The. Conjuring 2

Rating: 6/10 (18 September 2016)

There is a series of scenes in "The Conjuring 2" that left me holding my breath at many moments, and these scenes in the first half of the film are honestly very scary. This makes it all the more upsetting when suddenly it turns into a corny supernatural thriller towards the end, with an incredibly cheesy and contrived scene involving the characters sitting in the back of an ambulance after the climax (does anyone else feel like this type of scene has become a trope?).
The early scenes of the film do a good job recreating not just the look of the time and place, but the zeitgeist of it. We get to know this family, who is basically just a normal working class family, with a single mother.
The scariest moments in the film begin with Janet suddenly waking up on the floor. Downstairs. She walks back upstairs, and then begins to talk to herself in two completely different voices. Suddenly, Margaret hears from behind her "This is my house" in a deep, scratchy voice. She turns around. There is no one. This is the genius of the scenes things happen, but then there's nothing every time, and the viewer is just waiting for the moment when things go really wrong, but it's not coming. This is suspense, and this is horror. Another great moment is when Billy walks downstairs to get water. When he is walking back up, you can subtly see someone sitting in the leather chair to his right in the other room, but it's just a silhouette. Now the viewer is really on edge. He goes upstairs and suddenly his toy firetruck goes off. He turns it off and pushes it back into the tent. When he walks over to his bed, we hear the toy go off and roll out of the tent once again, and Billy freezes. He leans back and we think he is about to go turn it off and in our minds we think "no don't do it!" Then he starts to get back into his bed, then once again he leans back and the camera follows him, and we think "No!" Then he goes into his bed all the way. But the camera stays looking out into the hallway for just enough time to be completely on edge and aware that something is about to happen. Then the kid comes back into frame, but when he goes back into his bed this time, the camera moves with him. We are relieved for a second, then suddenly we hear the firetruck roll into the room. He turns it off, walks back over to his tent, rolls it into the tent, then it is rolled right back out, facing the opposite direction, and when the boy grabs it, we immediately hear a loud scream from a grown man. This is one of the two very effective jump-scares in the film (the second being the "MY HOUSE" jumpscare, with the old man and the remote control), because of how long it takes to build up its tension, and then how unexpectedly it hits you. There was no face popping out, just a scream. It earns the jumpscare with the tension.
All of this great tension building is thrown out of the window in the second half of the film however, in favor of a corny supernatural thriller with a message of "help others, especially when no one else will". There is nothing wrong with the message, but the way it is integrated into the film does not mesh very well with any sort of serious horror, and the whole film becomes very over the top and silly. There is a single moment I can think of where I genuinely felt for one of the characters, and this was when Maurice was talking about his dead daughter.
Even the all of the entities in the house become not at all scary, because we are shown so much of them for so long, that we get used to it. Also, the crooked man just looks silly in general, he looks like a tall stop motion animated figure, and the way he moves is almost cartoony. The jump-scares become much more predictable, and there is only a single moment I can remember that had me genuinely tense.
This moment was short, but it was when Ed was reaching down into the water to find something, just after Peggy had been bitten under water. There's already tension that he will also be bitten, but at the edge of the frame as the camera is zooming in on Ed, there is a head only slightly above water. This seriously put me on edge, and then there was no jump-scare, so it forced me to stay pretty tense. This was a smart moment because of its subtlety, and subtlety, many don't realize, is the key to horror. Seeing doors slam and things fly across the room isn't scary, in fact it gets boring pretty quickly. Seeing a silhouette figure near the edge of the frame, that the characters don't notice, but you know is right there, THAT'S scary.