The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It: Different, but Maintains the Most Important Aspect of the Series – Love
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, the third “Conjuring” film and the eight in the larger Conjuring universe, explores the case of Arne Johnson in an engaging investigative horror with a screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and a story by McGoldrick and James Wan.
Michael Chaves, director of the previous in-universe film The Curse of la Llorona, takes over directing from James Wan who helmed both previous Conjuring films.
Finds the Beauty and Love of Horror
This installment in The Conjuring series does a wonderful job of highlighting the beauty within the horror genre. Throughout the film, I felt drawn in by the cinematography (Michael Burgess), production design (Jennifer Spence), and costume design (Leah Butler).
The opening scene is one of the most intense of the series and offers well-crafted references to horror classics. This scene is fast-paced and engaging offering a slightly different style of horror than the film’s later scares.
The Conjuring series always works wonders in its costuming, perfectly capturing its era through these design choices. This third film kept up these high expectations for period accuracy.
In addition to the costumes, the production design works wonderfully to set us within 1981, an early year in the decade where the cultural aesthetic of the 1970s is still clearly visible. The strong difference between how Arne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor) and Debbie Glatzel (Sarah Catherine Hook) are shown alone together and moments of the Warrens highlights how the same year/decade is represented differently for characters of different ages.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It uses light and shadow to craft subtle, but impactful scare scenes, highlighting what is seen and unseen.
This third film maintains the previous films’ focus on love, family, and understanding. This series has always been wonderful at finding comforting moments within films aimed to make us feel the uncomfortable dread of the uncertain. Ed Warren and Lorraine Warren share a strong and loving relationship brought beautifully to life by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
Their chemistry is sublime and allows the relationship between the two characters to feel natural and inviting. Each film previously has sweet and memorable moments highlighting their love.
The Devil Made Me Do It is no exception. One of my favorite scenes in the film is a small sweet gesture from Lorraine to Ed, showcasing how much she understands him and how deep their love runs. Throughout the film, Ed and Lorraine often show how protective they are of each other. Having this go both ways allows their love to really shine.
This film also features flashbacks showing how they met, which offers a nice insight into their relationship. These flashback moments feature Megan Ashley Brown as Lorraine and Mitchell Hoog as Ed giving charming performances in moments built around love and pushing toward how important their love is within the film–and series–as a whole.
One aspect of this focus on love and family that felt slightly less involved than it did in previous films comes in the relationships between the Warrens and the families involved in their cases. Most of this comes from exploring a case not surrounding one haunted house, so there are not as many moments where Ed and Lorraine are in close contact during the most harrowing moments of these families.
This limits the number of emotional moments of Ed and Lorraine offering support to the people they are trying to help, such as the scene in The Conjuring 2 of Ed singing “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” as a way to bond with and offer comfort to the Hodgson family.
Still, the film works hard on maintaining its well-established tone of being heartfelt and emotionally impactful by including more moments highlighting Warren’s relationship and going deeper into how they interact with each other.
In a moment where their investigation involves crawling in the dirt, Ed in an effort to let Lorraine have him crawl instead, comments on her crawling in her nice dress. Lorraine chooses to ignore this comment with her response of, “Hold my purse.”
Different Style of Horror
The Devil Made Me Do It might come across as not enough of a horror movie to some genre fans, and there were moments throughout the film where I wished for more scares, but I also appreciated and loved the investigative tone of the film.
This installment feels like The X-Files with Ed and Lorraine. Personally, I felt that this worked well with the particular case, and put Ed and Lorraine together through most of the film, exploring as a team. This connection makes the moments where they are separated that much more impactful and dreadful.
The few scares we get are well-crafted and memorable especially the waterbed moment and the sequence of Lorraine in the woods. One of my favorite moments comes late into the film and utilizes Patrick Wilson’s range in a sequence with visual allusions to The Shining. His performance throughout the film is great, and this moment–vastly different than what we had seen so far in the film–shows the vast scope of his talent.
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are the heart and soul of this series, and both give powerful performances.
Wilson’s performance captures the subtleties of his character while showcasing how passionate Ed can be when he feels the dignity of a well-meaning person is on the line. The intense adoration and drive to help people come through in every scene no matter how many other strong emotions he is going through simultaneously.
Farmiga works wonders in moments where Lorraine tries to hide the fright she feels. In a moment where she has a gut feeling about going into a particular room, we know exactly how she feels through the briefest of facial expressions, and quickly adopt her fear as our own.
Conclusion
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is a different breed of horror, but is still just as beautiful and engaging while keeping its established balance of exploring the human side of fear and finding time to highlight love and family.
Are you a fan of The Conjuring universe and would you like to see more installments in the main series and its connected films? Share your thoughts in the comments.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It released in theaters June 4th and streams on HBO Max for 31 days from its release.
Watch The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
Does content like this matter to you?
Become a Member and support film journalism. Unlock access to all of Film Inquiry`s great articles. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about cinema - get access to our private members Network, give back to independent filmmakers, and more.
