A genuinely creepy horror movie that re-imagines established conventions

Rating: 9/10 (27 August 2016)

I'm impressed! 'The Conjuring 2' is a great movie! Although I had read good reviews beforehand, I was still a bit anxious if it could keep up the high standard that was set by the first part back in 2013. After the relatively weak 'Insidious 2' that was James Wan's most disappointing directorial effort to date in my opinion—which is quite surprising as it came out the same year as the 'The Conjuring'—I must admit I did have some doubts. Still, 'Furious 7' was a good movie and it directly precedes 'The Conjuring 2' in Wan's filmography as director, so I was looking forward to seeing it. In fact, most of Wan's directing is quite impressive and there is hardly a movie he directed that I would call a true failure. Before seeing 'The Conjuring 2,' the two Wan movies that I rated highest were 'Saw' (2004) and 'Death Sentence' (2007). That has changed now. I think 'The Conjuring 2' is his most impressive directorial effort to date.
It is better than the first part—which was already good—and one of only a few horror movies I have seen in recent years that I would call genuinely creepy. It's quite an achievement to make a horror movie that runs for a whopping 134 minutes that doesn't have any lengths in it and never gets boring. James Wan did that and much more. 'The Conjuring 2' harks back to a number of classics in the horror genre like 'Poltergeist' (1982), 'The Amityville Horror' (1979), 'The Exorcist' (1973), and 'The Sixth Sense' (1999), but does not actually copy them. Wan merely uses a number of the most effective scare tactics that were introduced in those movies but adapts them in his own unique way so that they appeal to a modern audience that has already seen everything. Because of the established settings and well-known scary elements you'd expect to see in this kind of horror movie, 'The Conjuring 2' feels very familiar and I had a sense of déjà vu at certain points in the movie.
Nevertheless, the movie does never feel clichéd because Wan is a very creative director who takes inspiration from classic horror movies but never dully imitates them like so many modern-day horror movies do. It's obvious that James Wan knows the horror genre very well and he knows how to effectively re-imagine its conventions and play with established tactics. The first half of the movie is especially eerie with its very effective use of shadows and sounds. I found the sound design done by Eliot Connors and Peter Staubli to be exceptional: Creaking doors, squeaky floors, pattering rain, low ringing bells in the night and all that make for a really spine-chilling atmosphere. Moreover, James Wan's direction is pretty much flawless and Don Burgess' cinematography is impressive. There are a couple of tracking shots in the movie that simply look amazing. The whole cast led by the delightful Vera Farmiga is great, too.
What I really love is when directors have an eye for small details in their movies and truly care about seemingly unimportant scenes that don't contribute to the plot but are still crucial as to how an audience perceives a movie. James Wan is such a director. In 'The Conjuring 2,' there is one scene in which Patrick Wilson's character Ed Warren brings a copy of Elvis' 'Blue Hawaii' soundtrack album to the Hodgson house because it was mentioned earlier that the kids' father took his Elvis collection with him when he left the family and the kids loved to listen to it. He puts the record on the turntable and everyone who knows Elvis' music will expect to get to hear the classic song 'Can't Help Falling in Love' now... but the turntable is broken! "What a bummer," I think, but then Patrick Wilson grabs an acoustic guitar that just stands there in the corner, sits down on the edge of an armchair, and delivers a pretty good impromptu take on the song with the kids chiming in at the end. "Great," I think, "but it would have been nice to hear at least a bit of Elvis' original version when they show the record and its cover so prominently in the movie. Oh well." Because of all the creepy stuff that is then going on in the movie, I completely forget about the song, and when Ed stores the Crooked Man music box away after the finale, and I hear those familiar, haunting lines "like a river flows, surely to the sea" from afar, I'm just as surprised as Ed. Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) put a copy of 'Blue Hawaii' on the turntable and the movie ends with her and Ed dancing to "Can't Help Falling in Love." I have heard this fantastic song hundreds of times but it's like hearing a familiar song in a completely new way when it's used so skillfully in a movie. A great way to end a great movie. Actually, I would have expected the movie to end differently with some kind of creepy shot suggesting that evil still lurks around the corner, but James Wan is not a director who bothers with those clichés.
So, to put it in a nutshell, this is a very well-made movie that no horror fan should miss.