Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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Conjuring a Universe: James Wan, Creepy Dolls and

Demon Nuns

Laura Mee

To cite this article: Laura Mee (2021): Conjuring a Universe: James Wan, Creepy Dolls and
Demon Nuns, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2021.1996311

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2021.1996311

© 2021 The Author(s). Published with

license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Published online: 03 Nov 2021.

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QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO
https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2021.1996311

Conjuring a Universe: James Wan, Creepy Dolls and

Demon Nuns
Laura Mee

The Conjuring (2013) opens with a prologue in which a group of terrified

flatmates recount a haunting story to paranormal investigators Ed and
Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga). A porcelain doll,
“Annabelle”, has been terrorizing them by inexplicably moving around the
apartment and leaving threatening notes. The Warrens explain that
Annabelle acts as a conduit for a demon in search of a human host. They
take the doll and lock it away in their museum of occult artifacts, a secure
room in their home which is blessed each fortnight by a visiting priest.
Pre-credit setpieces which introduce characters, story and tone are of
course common, and the device is often employed effectively in horror cin-
ema to provide a backstory, an early scare, a first glimpse of a monster or
their menace: a young Michael Myers murders his sister in Halloween
(1978), a highly-billed star is brutally murdered in Scream (1996), the zom-
bie apocalypse causes chaos in Dawn of the Dead (2004), and a woman
flees an unseen force in It Follows (2014). The Conjuring’s opening serves a
similar function, but, watching retroactively, it introduces us to the
Warrens as the center of the universe eventually spawned from the film,
while also teasing its first spin-off, Annabelle (2014).
The Conjuring’s success resulted in the quick development of this second
feature—a stand-alone film exploiting a potential new horror antagonist—
soon followed by The Conjuring 2 (2016), a sequel continuing the story of
the Warrens and their work. Both were commercially successful (and the
Conjuring films—unlike Annabelle—were critically well-received), ensuring
additional installments. Promotional materials for the subsequent
Annabelle: Creation (2017) explicitly positioned the film as “the next chap-
ter in The Conjuring universe”, and the film’s success tipped the franchise
over the $1billion mark, making it one of the most successful horror series

Laura Mee is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Hertfordshire and co-convenor of the
BAFTSS Horror Studies SIG. Her research focuses on horror cinema, adaptation, and seriality. She is the author of
Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and Devil’s
Advocates: The Shining (Auteur, 2017), and has published on rape-revenge remakes, the critical reception of hor-
ror remakes, Room 237 and cinephilia, and American Psycho and gender.
ß 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.
2 L. MEE

of all time and “a full-blown cinematic universe that any studio would
envy” (Mendelson 2017). The Nun (2018) and the in-development The
Crooked Man, like Annabelle, provide spin-off origin stories to flesh out
demons introduced in the Conjuring films. The Curse of La Llorona (2019)
is loosely connected via the character of Father Perez (Tony Amendola),
who features in Annabelle, and in La Llorona recounts his experience with
the cursed doll. Annabelle Comes Home (2019) brings the doll back to the
Warrens, connecting the two series. A second sequel to The Conjuring, The
Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) was released in 2021, a year
after its theatrical release was postponed due to the COVID19 pandemic.
At the heart of the series is writer/producer/director James Wan, whose
reputation shifted in the 2010s from an arguably misplaced association
with “splat pack” horror filmmakers like Rob Zombie and Eli Roth, as a
co-creator of the Saw series, to a blockbuster horror auteur (Bernard 2015).
His particular brand of contemporary Gothic, favoring demonic posses-
sions, jump scares and haunted houses over violence and gore, connects
the Conjuring franchise to a number of other films Wan directed or pro-
duced such as the Insidious series, Dead Silence (2007), Demonic (2015)
and Lights Out (2016). This association cemented his horror credentials
even as he simultaneously branched out to direct major action franchise
installments Furious 7 (2015) and Aquaman (2018). This article considers
how The Conjuring franchise’s interconnected characters and narratives
contribute to a worldbuilding model which effectively links a potentially
poor-performing spin-off like Annabelle to its more popular origins by way
of Wan’s horror auteur status. Wan’s position as the creative anchor of The
Conjuring universe suggests a codependent relationship between brand and
creator; the series became successful in part due to its association with
Wan, and in turn his status grew as the franchise developed. As a co-pro-
ducer for all of the installments, and with writing credits on many, but as
director of just two Conjuring films, Wan pushes the established boundaries
of auteurism as a model concerned with a “director’s cinema”, while pro-
viding a case study of the filmmaker as brand. The horror universe is, in
this case, marketed as a complex, evolving creation weaved by a revered
genre auteur, and through this association it is deliberately distanced from
the idea of an economically calculated, commercial “franchise”.

Franchise Worlds
Opening The Conjuring with Annabelle’s introduction suggested that the
doll would prominently feature in the film, as did posters and promotional
images that showed her staring dead-eyed at the camera. Relegating her to
the Warren’s occult museum instead opened two channels for future
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 3

serialization—Annabelle’s own story, and the dozens of further cases

investigated by the Warrens. Each of the countless trinkets, masks, statues
and pictures lining the walls and shelves of their archives represent an
intriguing story to be told (a concept eventually exploited to its maximum
potential in Annabelle Comes Home, in which several of the pieces spark
supernatural events). A music box blamed for much of The Conjuring’s
demonic activity joins the museum’s artifacts in the film’s closing moments,
as does a zoetrope featuring the Crooked Man of The Conjuring 2.
To date, the franchise has branched off in three main directions. Firstly,
The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 focus on the Warrens as they investi-
gate major cases of demonic hauntings. In the first film, set in 1971, the
Perron family are tormented by the spirit of a witch, Bathsheba, who even-
tually possesses mother Carolyn (Lili Taylor). In the sequel, set in 1977, the
Hodgson family home is seemingly haunted by a former resident, whose
spirit is controlled by a demonic nun, Valak (Bonnie Aarons). Secondly,
Annabelle and Annabelle: Creation offer two prequels to the doll’s story
before it comes to be in the Warrens’ possession, each delving further (and
more complexly) into its past. In 1967, John Form (Ward Horton) gives
the doll as a gift to his pregnant wife Mia (Annabelle Wallis). During a
home invasion by their neighbour’s estranged daughter and cult member
Annabelle, it becomes a tool in her ritualistic suicide. The doll and its
inhabitant follow the family to their new home and attempt to possess their
new born baby. In a final scene, Annabelle is discovered in an antique
shop by a woman who buys it as a gift for her daughter, a nurse—setting
up the opening scene of The Conjuring. Creation opens with a toymaker
crafting the doll before his daughter dies in a car accident; he and his wife
unwittingly make a pact with a demon which moves in to the doll, later
tormenting a group of orphan girls staying in their home. It possesses one
of the girls, Janice (Talitha Bateman), who flees the orphanage, renames
herself Annabelle, and is ultimately adopted by the Forms’ neighbors—
Creation ends with the home invasion seen early in Annabelle. Annabelle
Comes Home connects the strands of the Conjuring world back together,
opening with a recap of The Conjuring’s pre-credits scene in which the
unfortunate owners of the doll hand her over to the Warrens, who secure
her in a glass case in their home museum. Lorraine warns Ed that
Annabelle is “a beacon for other spirits”. Sure enough, while they are away,
Annabelle is inadvertently released, activating much of the other supernat-
ural paraphernalia in the house, a premise described by Wan as “Night at
the Museum with Annabelle” (in Crow 2018). Finally, The Nun provides an
origin story for the demon Valak first introduced in The Conjuring 2.
The Vatican sends Father Burke (Demian Bichir) and Sister Irene (Taissa
Farmiga), a postulant nun yet to take her vows, to investigate an abbey in
4 L. MEE

Romania after a nun takes her own life in suspicious circumstances. They
discover the abbey stands atop a gateway to hell, through which Valak
enters and takes the form of a nun to deceive and hide among the others.
The pair defeat Valak and close the gate with the help of a villager,
Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), who tells Irene his real name, Maurice. The
Nun’s final scene is a reprise of one from The Conjuring: in a lecture two
decades later, the Warrens screen footage of their exorcism on a man now
revealed as Frenchie—a key scene which connects the two films, but also
shows the moment Lorraine first sees Valak, tying together the Conjuring
universe’s various strands.
As David Church (2021) argues, the contemporary film franchise (in
horror, as elsewhere) does not consist solely of serial features which con-
tribute to an ever-unfolding linear narrative, but instead is often formed of
intertextual installments—sequels or prequels, spin-offs, remakes and
reboots, with merchandise and fan-made videos offering additional content.
The Conjuring franchise is made up of a number of these interconnected
“mutiplicities” (Klein and Palmer 2016): The Conjuring 2 is a sequel to The
Conjuring, Annabelle: Creation is a prequel to Annabelle, itself a prequel to
The Conjuring, The Nun functions as a prequel to The Conjuring 2 by out-
lining an origin story for its antagonist, Annabelle Comes Home is both a
third Annabelle film and a sequel to The Conjuring, while Annabelle and
The Nun (and the mooted The Crooked Man) are also spin-offs from The
Conjuring and its sequel. While linking to other installments through the
appearance of characters, and tying together narratives in pre-credits, mid-
or post-credit and closing scenes, each film also functions as a standalone
feature with a self-contained plot. I have argued elsewhere (Mee 2017) that
increasingly, various forms of adaptive serialization often defy neat categor-
ization, or may form multiple roles simultaneously (e.g. prequel and spin-
off) due to the intertextual nature of contemporary franchise filmmaking.
Rather than attempting to precisely define and categorize such franchise
installments, it is more productive to consider how, in dialogue with one
another, the films within a franchise expand that narrative world, each
offering a branch to its wider universe and a connection to other install-
ments, opening avenues for audience experience that are further enriched
by paratexts and fan interaction. Franchises are enhanced by each of their
overlapping, interconnecting texts, and the connections between install-
ments are arguably just as significant as the films themselves. New series
releases can be characterized as both “an emergent singularity and a part of
what has gone before, as an entity for but not entirely in itself, as a textual-
ization that is sufficiently insufficient, never hermetic, but instead always
open to extension” (Klein and Barton Palmer 2016, 5).
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 5

We can, of course, understand franchise storytelling in this way as symp-

tomatic of the age of media convergence, as per Henry Jenkins’s model of
transmedia (2006). Jenkins popularized the idea that contemporary media
franchises are often dependent on creating and populating new worlds
across different spaces and platforms with space for interrelated characters
and narratives. Within the context of world building, we can think of The
Conjuring, Annabelle and The Nun’s stories and characters as separate yet
connected, woven together by a series of narrative “threads” and “braids”
(Wolf 2014) which may run concurrently for a time before splitting, con-
necting with new characters or new stories to form a new part of the fabric
from which a larger world is stitched.
In The Conjuring series, Annabelle’s story begins entwined with the
Warrens’, before these two threads split to enable them to run parallel.
Further threads including the nun Valak’s also separate, occasionally meet-
ing and interweaving before being pulled back together for the most recent
films. These narrative threads rely on “transfictionality”—the interconnec-
tion of characters and events in a shared narrative space (Saint-Gelais
2005)—and the variation of textual forms within the franchise. As Mark
J.P. Wolf argues:
Series of sequels advance the overarching story of a world, but quite often this story
grows into both the future and the past as more and more backstories and stories of
origins are developed to explain characters, places, and conflicts (207).

Wolf’s work, like much on worldbuilding, focuses on the expansive,

imagined realms more common to science fiction and fantasy, such as The
Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones or Star Wars (see also Harvey 2015;
Boni 2017; Scolari, Freeman, and Bertetti 2014), or story worlds which are
connected to our own but feature fantastic additions, such as the Marvel
cinematic universe. By comparison, The Conjuring world is modest—a
handful of films, set in real-world locations, partly based on real-life char-
acters—but nonetheless it occupies an ever-expanding horror-fantasy uni-
verse haunted by supernatural monsters and demons who interact with
each other, and connected by key protagonists.
Beyond its films, a franchise’s various paratexts—trailers, promotion,
merchandising—have further “considerable power to amplify, reduce, erase,
or add meaning” (Gray 2010, 46) to existing texts and the worlds which
they occupy. The Conjuring’s posters centralize Annabelle, cueing expect-
ation of her prominence in the film and legitimizing the spin-off, and
Valak is featured in a post-credit teaser for The Nun at the end of
Annabelle: Creation. These additions not only work as advertisements for
future installments, but also strengthen the connections and interactions
between the films. This “commodity braiding” (Freeman 2014) functions
similarly to Wolf’s “narrative braiding”, intertwining ancillary material with
6 L. MEE

narrative threads. VR or 360 degree videos for The Conjuring 2, Annabelle:

Creation, The Nun and Annabelle Comes Home, released by distributor
Warner Bros. during promotion, encourage further engagement by inviting
audiences to explore their respective haunted houses, as does merchandise
including Annabelle and Valak collectible dolls. A competition launched by
Creation’s producers offered fans the chance to win a trip to LA to meet
New Line producers in exchange for creating their own Annabelle-inspired
short film—the winner, The Nurse (2017) introduces a new monster to the
universe—and Annabelle: Creation, Annabelle Comes Home and The Nun
websites and social media feeds share fan art. Audience contribution to and
interaction with the Conjuring world is actively encouraged, and while con-
sideration of the “immaterial labour” (Hassler-Forest 2016) required of
their contributions is important, this participation can be understood as
part of the “mind games played by the creative and cultural industries to
draw us into the serial experience” (Lindner 2014, x).
The result of the Conjuring’s transfictionality and commodity braiding is
that The Conjuring can be marketed as a creatively organic, expanding uni-
verse, a storyworld with continued opportunities for new installments,
evolved and grown in conjunction with its audience. This is an appealing
prospect in opposition to the rather structurally rigid idea of a “series” or
the commercially-focused “franchise”. As Derek Johnson argues:
Calling something a “franchise” is not a neutral declaration: it prompts us to think
about the media in the same terms that we think about McDonald’s. There is a
recognition of the industrial basis for that culture and its hyper-commercial, systemic
mode of multiplication and maintenance over time. Often that comes with an
implied critique as well, where acknowledging something as a “franchise” product
suggests that its existence is based on market calculation more than creative
expression. (in Jenkins 2014)

This issue is potentially more pronounced in horror cinema. The genre

already contends with a general consensus of its supposedly low cultural
status, but critics and fans alike have further complained about horror’s
commercialization via seriality, despite the potential for sequels, remakes
and reboots to contribute creatively to an existing franchise or point it in a
new direction (Mee forthcoming). In his book Media Franchising, Johnson
suggests that the practice, despite its connotations, is not solely commercial
or economic, but instead the product of interaction between audiences,
industry and producers, necessarily complex due to contemporary media
conglomeration and globalization. Regardless, the commercialism of fran-
chise entertainment “raises the stakes for media workers to position them-
selves as creative and as different from all the others that use the same idea
or premise or property toward this ongoing commercial end”, Johnson
argues. This “imperative for differentiation” (quoted in Jenkins 2014) is
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 7

evident in The Conjuring world as it is in other franchises, and manifests

not only via the construction and promotion of a “universe”, but also by
retaining an inventor at its center. Story worlds are usually transauthorial,
the expansion of imagined universes relying on collaborative effort beyond
their originator (Wolf 2014)—but will often continue to refer to the creator
of their origins to signpost canonicity. In The Conjuring universe, this
authorial architect is James Wan.

Horror Auteurs and the James Wan Brand

Wan describes the Conjuring world as his own universe (Crow 2018), and
has provided an identifiable creative center around which to brand the
series. He directed both Conjuring films, as well as co-writing and co-
producing The Conjuring 2, The Nun, Annabelle Comes Home and The
Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, and is credited as producer for
Annabelle and Annabelle: Creation. His horror credentials were initially
formed with Saw (2004), a low-budget project with a screenplay by friend
Leigh Whannell, which achieved unanticipated success due to its inclusion
in the so-called “torture porn” cycle of the early 2000s and the pair’s initial
association with the new American Splat Pack filmmakers like Rob Zombie
(House of 1000 Corpses 2003) and Eli Roth (Hostel 2005). Wan and
Whannell have subsequently suggested that they initially imagined Saw as a
Hitchcockian thriller rather than a gory splatter film, and resented the way
the film (and by association, they themselves) became known for its role in
initiating the torture porn trend. Constricted by a limited budget and
shooting schedule, the production was forced to rely upon violence over
suggestion and suspense in order to appeal to audiences (Bernard 2015,
159). The pair distanced themselves from the Splat Pack after Saw (while
retaining Executive Producer credits throughout the series, and with
Whannell writing or co-writing the first two sequels), but continued to
work together. Whannell wrote and Wan directed Dead Silence before they
collaborated with Blumhouse—the low-budget horror studio responsible for
the highly successful Paranormal Activity series—to make Insidious (2010)
for a reported $1.5 million. A haunted-house horror much closer to Wan
and Whannell’s interests, Insidious proved profitable, spawning its own
franchise with three sequels, and introducing the paranormal style that
Wan later captured in The Conjuring—his first film without Whannell.
Wan’s films, and especially the Insidious and Conjuring series, exemplify a
focus on the paranormal in mainstream horror post-2010, a shift from the
visceral violence of horror cinema during the prior decade, and demon-
strate the reliable nature of this cycle for studios—The Conjuring grossed
more than 15 times its budget worldwide (boxofficemojo). Moving away
8 L. MEE

from the torture porn trends with which he was so uncomfortably associ-
ated, Wan ultimately became “the most bankable auteur to emerge from
the Splat Pack” (Bernard 2015, 196).
Contemporary approaches to auteurism have evolved from analyses of
stylistic and thematic patterns across a director’s work (although these
remain central, as I will demonstrate), broadening to consider their films in
an industry context and to examine the interaction between branding and
reception. Using Corrigan and Grant’s models in his study of Wan and the
promotion of the Saw series, Tyson Wils (2013) argues that auteurism now
“exists as doxa, as a type of knowledge that is shared by the community at
large, which accept it as a normal way of speaking about and representing
film and other cultural texts”. This knowledge is exploited in film market-
ing: filmmakers (be they directors, producers, or writers) are promoted as
an identifiable brand, used to differentiate and distinguish various texts
among overcrowded, instantly accessible media platforms. It is further
employed in dialogue with audiences, Wils argues; this is evident in the
marketing of The Conjuring films as discussed earlier, and in sustained pro-
motion for Saw, where audiences were encouraged by Wan and Whannell
to engage in heated discussion about the film on the Lionsgate studio-
owned House of Jigsaw website (Bernard 2015, 160).
When it comes to horror, auteurism (or more specifically, the filmmaker
as brand) serves a further purpose. Wils suggests that “one dominant
motivation is the usefulness of auteurism for negotiating the complicated
field of mass and niche entertainment” (my emphasis). Similarly, Joe
Tompkins argues that “auteurism operates as a form of product differenti-
ation that contributes to the cult status of horror cinema” (2014, 204),
identifying a pattern of marketing horror through its association with
directors which began with key 1970s figures such as Wes Craven, Tobe
Hooper and George Romero, then seen as examples of progressive film-
makers working outside of the mainstream, subverting ideological and for-
mal generic norms. This was of course during a period of American
filmmaking which romanticized the concept of the auteur and their
“independent” approach to directing. As Tompkins and others have argued,
the tendency to enshrine genre films of the 1970s as auterist, anti-main-
stream art ignores both changing practices in production and distribution,
as well as a more commercial purpose for the auteur model whereby film-
makers became appealing brand names, their association a promise of
“quality” (in whatever subjective form that takes) and an identifiable, mar-
ketable selling point. Horror cinema remains a director’s genre, with fans
encouraged via horror sites, magazines, conventions and festivals to seek
out a filmmaker’s work:
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 9

Today, a director who makes one or two moderately interesting horror films is
quickly labeled a “horror auteur” [ … ] this is at once a fine instance of the
marketing of auteur nostalgia, and a further indication that the contemporary horror
director’s auteur status remains circumscribed by genre’. (Bernadini, in
Tompkins 207)

James Wan’s work is comparatively more mainstream than the film-

makers in Tompkins’s case study of the splat pack, whose packaging as
genre “auteurs” he likens to Romero et al—Zombie, Roth, and Alexandre
Aja are included here, but notably Wan is not, supporting Bernard’s
description of the filmmaker’s association with the group as an
“uncomfortable” one. Regardless, Wan’s genre reputation grew following
Saw, Insidious, and especially The Conjuring, and he has proven himself a
both a reliable industry figure and a key figure in genre filmmaking for
audiences and studios alike. On the one hand, he has garnered a reputation
for making suspenseful supernatural films that are popular with horror
fans, broader audiences and critics. Simultaneously, he is a dependable box
office draw—helming three commercial horror series featuring profitable
releases, and since directing major Hollywood action films. The launch of
his own sci-fi and horror production company Atomic Monster
Productions, responsible for all the Conjuring franchise entries aside from
the original film, plus additional paranormal horror like Lights Out and
The Curse of La Llorona, a Swamp Thing (2019) television series, recent
films including Wan’s own Malignant (2021) and a roster of in-develop-
ment titles including new adaptations of ‘Salem’s Lot, The Tommyknockers
and Arachnophobia, further cement his genre status. Deals with studios
including New Line and the Chinese company Starlight Media demonstrate
commercial shrewdness and the potential for Wan’s horror brand’s success
both domestically and globally (Ford 2016).
Wan’s growing status in horror cinema over the last fifteen years—and
how this was ultimately tied to a growing Conjuring universe—is exemplified
in promotional materials. Despite the aesthetic and thematic shifts between
the films, Saw was used as a selling point in marketing paratexts for Dead
Silence and Death Sentence (2007), their posters and trailers announcing
“from the director of Saw”—linking the films to suggest a brand appeal even
before Wan’s name was commonly known (and notably, excluding Whannell
as writer, thus centralizing the brand of the director). Promotion for
Insidious made a further connection, “from the makers of Paranormal
Activity and Saw 2”, linking a new franchise with two existing, hugely suc-
cessful horror series (Wils 2013). By the time of The Conjuring’s release,
Insidious had proved successful enough in its own right to be used alongside
Saw in promotion (“from the director of Insidious and Saw”), before Saw
was dropped completely in marketing for The Conjuring 2 (“from the
10 L. MEE

director of Insidious and The Conjuring”), the association now clearly with
Wan’s supernatural style. When it came to promotion for Annabelle—not
directed by Wan—the angle of association changed, dropping the reference
to filmmakers and instead explicitly positioning the film as a prequel: “before
The Conjuring, there was Annabelle”. Later additions to the franchise expli-
citly connect the films to their wider story world: Annabelle: Creation was
announced as “the next chapter in The Conjuring universe”, while promotion
for The Nun invited viewers to “witness the darkest chapter in The Conjuring
universe”, and Annabelle Comes Home reaffirms the universe’s narrative focus
on the Warrens: “Welcome to the home of The Conjuring universe”. Even
the Annabelle-adjacent The Curse of La Llorona is marketed via its relation-
ship: “From the producers of The Conjuring universe”. Wan’s self-described
universe took over as its own selling point, and promotion centers on the
expansion of that universe, but this strategy can be clearly traced back to pro-
moting Wan at the helm of the franchise.
The Conjuring universe stretches the accepted definition of director-
as-auteur. As director, (co-)writer, and (co-)producer, Wan provides an
authorial, reliable anchor at its center, a recognizable creative touchstone
around which the films can be located. Despite only directing a handful of
its titles, the world is clearly cued as Wan’s, and his involvement shaped
this brand appeal. His position as director was used a selling point for The
Conjuring through connection with his earlier horror films, rather than his
name, and linking the Annabelle films and The Nun explicitly to The
Conjuring “universe” avoids using the “producer” label in instances where
he did not direct, promoting and associating the films as part of a creative
universe as opposed to a commercial franchise (The Curse of La Llorona’s
promotional connection to the “producers of The Conjuring universe” is
perhaps an acceptable anomaly due to its position on the periphery of the
universe, where its potential to be seen as a cash-in arguably matters less).
While Wan’s significant success in the contemporary horror film industry
is apparent, and shaped the success of The Conjuring series, promotional
strategies appear to foreground the coherence of the universe through a
series of textual, as opposed to industrial, connections. In this way,
although industry contexts clearly remain significant when considering
auteurs as marketable brands, the traditional focus of auteurism—the stylis-
tic and thematic patterns in a filmmaker’s work—are of equal importance.
Analyzing these connections in the Conjuring films can tell us a great deal
more about the way in which the franchise became a universe.

The Conjuring World

The aesthetic Wan creates in The Conjuring and returns to in The
Conjuring 2—and which Leonetti, Sandberg, Hardy and Dauberman
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 11

emulate and expand upon with varying success in the Annabelle films and
The Nun—had already been effectively established in Insidious. Although
the tone of The Conjuring is arguably more serious than Wan’s previous
film, lacking the comic relief of clairvoyant assistants Specs (Leigh
Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) and the camp excess of the final
act’s journey into the supernatural realm of the “Further”, they are still
quite similar in style and theme, and the two share additional connections
with the other films. All the films with the exception of The Nun are set in
haunted family houses, a number in new homes (the Warrens’ place is
even new for Annabelle), and often (expectedly) gloomy, older houses with
especially creepy attics, basements or outbuildings. Scares are created
through a mix of effective sudden jump shocks juxtaposed with long silen-
ces, periods of suspense and subtle, creepy imagery. Patrick Wilson plays
protagonists in both Insidious and The Conjuring, and Joseph Bishara
appears as a demon throughout both series, as well as composing scores
for Insidious, Annabelle, Annabelle Comes Home and the three Conjuring
films. Other key crew worked across the two series including John R.
Leonetti, who was the cinematographer for Insidious and its first sequel
before directing Annabelle (see Murphy 2015) for further examples of these
personnel connections). Insidious and Annabelle feature additional home
moves in an attempt to escape demons (while the family of The Conjuring
are reminded that this is ineffective). Children are frequently threatened by
the films’ demons, reducing their parents to desperate wrecks in need of
help, which arrives in the shape of kindly mediums—Elise (Lin Shaye) in
Insidious, and clairvoyant Lorraine and demonologist Ed in The
Conjuring—along with a team of technical assistants.
Building the Conjuring world around the Warrens, a real-life husband
and wife investigative team tied to famous cases of alleged hauntings in
Amityville and Enfield in the 1970s, trades on the appeal of the “true story”
in horror, which has long acted as a genre selling point. From loose inspir-
ation (Ed Gein for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974), dramatization
(The Amityville Horror 1979) or total fabrications (The Blair Witch Project
1999), an association with historical “real events” might be used to ascribe
authenticity to an otherwise questionable story, to reassure audience’s reser-
vations around seeing a disreputable film, or to excuse narrative or ideo-
logical incoherence (Schaefer 1999, see also Jones 2013; Clayton 2015;
Leeder 2018, for examples). Immediately following Anabelle’s opening story
in The Conjuring, a cut reveals the Warrens speaking to an audience in a
lecture hall about the case. There is a fade to black and white and the
image changes to resemble halftone newsprint. Scrolling captions identify
the characters as real-life paranormal investigators, and the following “true
story” taken from their case files, one “so malevolent they’ve kept it locked
12 L. MEE

away until now” (not unlike Chain Saw, touted as “one of the most bizarre
crimes in the annals of American history”, or The Entity (1983), which
according to its trailer is the “most extraordinary case in the history of psy-
chic research”). While moving away from the Warren case files, Annabelle’s
Satanism theme references the 1960s media obsession over cult crimes (and
very clearly evokes Rosemary’s Baby 1968), as well as exploiting the con-
temporary popularization of true crime stories; Mia watches a news report
on the Manson murders on the night Annabelle breaks in and attempts to
murder her and her unborn child, an act of satanic “violence for violence’s
sake”, according to the detective who later interviews her.
The Conjuring 2 draws from two Warren cases. It opens with a seance
at the Amityville household, in which Lorraine envisages herself as
Ronnie DeFeo, a teenager who murdered his family, supposedly resulting
in them haunting the house’s subsequent occupants, the Lutzes (the
focus of The Amityville Horror). This scene begins with a shot of the
Amityville house’s recognizable windows, made iconic by the 1979 film.
At once, the film is aligned with both a real-life event, and a notable
horror text. But a further opportunity is taken here. The connection of
the real crime to the Amityville haunting, and the Warrens, is then
extended by bringing another character into the sequence: still in the
midst of a vision, Lorraine makes her way to the basement where she
encounters the demon Valak before seeing a premonition of Ed’s violent
death. This character continues to haunt Lorraine as they arrive in
London to investigate the Enfield poltergeist, seemingly the ghost of a
former resident, Bill Wilkins. In the film’s conclusion, Lorraine and Ed
realize that Valak is responsible for possessing the man’s spirit. This is a
manipulation of two “real-life” hauntings that the Warrens were tied to,
which are pulled together through their fabricated connection to the fic-
tional Valak—condemned to return to hell at the end of The Conjuring
2, and then the antagonist of The Nun. Annabelle Comes Home reaffirms
the significance of the Warrens’ case file history in its pre-credits scene,
as scrolling text reminds viewers “the Warren Artifact Room holds the
largest private collection of haunted and cursed objects … while every
object has its own terrifying history, there is one artifact that the
Warrens deem more malevolent than any other: ANNABELLE comes
home”. The film ends with a dedication to Lorraine Warren, who passed
away shortly before its release. Most recently, trailers and posters for
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It promoted its “shocking true
story” and its basis in the “true case files” of the Warrens.
Ed and Lorraine form the universe’s center, even when they are not
present in its installments. As protagonists in the Conjuring films, their
relationship and work provides a steady anchor around which the action
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 13

takes place. The haunted Perrons and Hodgsons are introduced and devel-
oped in parallel with the Warrens’ stories, until the couple relocate from
their own domestic space to exorcize the troubled family homes of each
narrative. In addition to their paranormal expertise, the pair provide calm-
ing respite; both films place emphasis on the strength of their partnership,
the script earnestly highlights their unwavering love for one another and
their daughter, and intense supernatural scenes are juxtaposed with roman-
tic dialogue where the two joke, comfort each other, and remind them-
selves of their abilities and desire to help others—often couched in a sense
of religious duty (“God brought us together for a reason”). In The
Conjuring, Roger Perron (Ron Livingston) works as a long-distance truck
driver, and although concerned for his family, is often away from the house
for long periods, leaving wife Carolyn to fend for herself and their five
daughters. Carolyn is gradually broken down by the spirit (a witch,
Bathsheba) to the point where it easily possesses her once she lets her
guard down. In the sequel, Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor) has been
left by a husband who “had twins with the woman up the road”, and is
also alone with her large family, struggling to cope financially and emotion-
ally. Her two older girls help her take care of the younger boys, but again
the stress of the situation and the hauntings leaves a family member, this
time daughter Janet (Madison Wolfe), vulnerable to possession. In both
cases, the Warrens’ arrival brings immediate calm and comfort to the
households, often by figuratively healing the fractured family unit—
Lorraine maternally protects and builds bonds with the children, and Ed
supports or fills the voids left by absent fathers, helping Roger to rebuild a
car engine, and leading a sickly Hodgson sing-a-long to Elvis Presley’s
Can’t Help Falling in Love. The Warrens are the light to the haunted fami-
lies’ darkness, a very clear marker of good (and God) in the face of all that
is evil (and demonic), addressing the trope of the vulnerable and broken
family in horror. Bernice M. Murphy (2015) further argues that The
Conjuring, like other examples of 2010s supernatural horror films focusing
on family hauntings including Insidious and Sinister (2012), offers an alle-
gory for the instability and anxiety faced by many middle-class Americans
in the wake of the 2000s economic crises, and that the Warrens’ comfort-
ably middle class life is in opposition to that of the struggling Perrons’.
While they do not prominently feature in the other films, the Warrens’
existence in the story world is often alluded to, and they cameo in sequen-
ces bookending other films. Even though Annabelle Comes Home is set in
their house, they are absent for much of the film’s running time. Annabelle
and her cohabitants from the artifact room—a werewolf or “Hellhound”, a
possessed wedding gown, a “Ferryman” who transports the souls of the
dead, a haunted television—instead torment their daughter Judy (McKenna
14 L. MEE

Grace) and her babysitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman) and friends
Daniela (Katie Sarif) and Bob Palmeri (Michael Cimino). But the Warrens
return near the film’s end and Lorraine helps Daniela connect with her
dead father. The Nun ends with the Warrens screening footage of
Maurice’s exorcism, described earlier in this article. Annabelle opens with a
short clip taken from the beginning of The Conjuring, with the flatmates
talking to Ed Warren, and later, when Father Perez takes the doll to his
church for safekeeping, he tells Mia that he has a connection with a couple
who can help. The film ends with a caption confirming the doll was moved
to the Warren’s safe artifact room, and then a quote from Lorraine: “the
threat of evil is ever present … we can contain it as long as we stay vigilant,
but it can never truly be destroyed”, suggesting the potential for Annabelle
to wreak further havoc.
The Annabelle films feature intertwined themes of faith and family similar
to those of The Conjuring. The expectant newlyweds John and Mia are
devoutly religious, turning to their priest for advice on the hauntings and
seeking support through their church, and Creation features a group of
orphaned girls who are wards of the Catholic Church, with a nun, Sister
Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman) as their guardian. In The Conjuring, Ed
instructs secular Roger to baptize their children, advising him they’ll stand
more of a chance against the witch’s curse if they embrace faith. Without the
religious instruction of the Warrens, the devotion of the Forms and Sister
Charlotte instead stands in as the obvious metaphor for religious good in the
face of evil. Family units are similarly framed. Just as Lorraine Warren’s
maternal instincts to protect the Perron and Hodgson children (as well as
her own daughter) are tied to her psychic powers and her belief in God, and
Valak attempts to possess Janet as a way to “attack [Lorraine’s] faith”, so too
do demons prey on children in Annabelle and Annabelle: Creation, with fam-
ilies required to pull together despite their broken forms in a display of
strength to combat them. Even with the Warrens divided in Annabelle
Comes Home, Judy promotes the importance of family by defending her
mother and father when Daniela seems flippant about their work, and
Daniela’s motivation for breaking in to the Warrens’ occult artifact room
(she finds the key hidden behind a framed picture of Jesus) is to attempt to
contact her late father. Lorraine later reassures her that he is at peace and
does not hold his daughter responsible for the accident that killed him.
While families are fractured and faith is essential in the Conjuring world,
the implications of these themes are perhaps more nuanced than they
might at first appear. The stability of the nuclear family is undoubtedly
privileged, and not just via the idyllic unit of Ed, Lorraine and Judy. The
Perrons are reunited in a scene of celebratory bliss after Carolyn is success-
fully exorcized, but without a patriarch, the Hodgsons are last seen apart—
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 15

Peggy talks to neighbors, and Janet sits in the back of an ambulance with
Ed as he reiterates Lorraine’s earlier advice to the girl about marrying a
supportive partner. Annabelle’s Mia is frustrated with her husband spend-
ing so much time away at work away during the pregnancy and the baby’s
first months. Creation’s girls long for adoption into family homes, and the
Mullins’ house is a strange, creepy place following the death of their young
daughter. In Annabelle Comes Home, Daniela (and especially her younger
brother, who bullies Judy at school) are initially presented as troublemakers
following the loss of their father. It could be suggested then that the films
are somewhat conservative in their surface message—families work better
when unified (and preferably nuclear)—but with the exception of The
Conjuring, in each of the films chosen families and constructed commun-
ities provide support. The Hodgson’s neighbors offer refuge and play a sig-
nificant role in solving the haunting, Mia is befriended by Evelyn (Alfre
Woodard) who provides comfort and guidance (although Evelyn, an
African-American woman who sacrifices herself to save Mia and the baby,
is a deeply problematic character archetype) and the Mullins open their
broken family home to the girls and their ward. With no family ties in The
Nun (although casting Vera Farmiga’s sister Taissa as the psychic Irene led
to speculation that the two characters are perhaps related), connections
instead exist in the sisterhood and the three main characters who work
together to overcome Valak. Even in Annabelle Comes Home, Mary Ellen,
Daniela and Bob extend the Warren family to celebrate Judy’s birthday at
the end of the film. Unified families in the mold of the Warrens are the
ideal, but strength is found in other social and community support net-
works in the Conjuring world.
Similarly, while Ed and Lorraine espouse the importance of spiritual devo-
tion, the Church itself is often criticized and, as an institution, fails to suffi-
ciently aid its members through crises. The Church is reluctant to help the
secular Perron family, and Ed and Lorraine break convention and risk
expulsion by performing an exorcism themselves. The Church has also failed
the orphans consigned to the Mullins household in Creation after their
children’s home is closed. The priest of Annabelle, despite his best inten-
tions, is unable to help and is overcome by the doll when he tries to lock it
in his church. In Janet’s room in The Conjuring 2, the demon’s inversion of
countless crucifixes donated by devout neighbors further suggests the impo-
tence of religious paraphernalia. Father Burke of The Nun is haunted by
visions of a failed exorcism which killed a possessed boy. Finally, Valak is a
clear challenge to the piousness of the sisterhood and the effectiveness of
religious dedication, and even the most devout nuns cannot defeat the
demon. It is implied that Sister Irene is questioning her path, and when she
does eventually take her vows it is a necessity, decided swiftly before facing
16 L. MEE

Valak, taking with her a vial containing the blood of Jesus. She uses this to
finally send Valak back to the underworld—but as we discover in the closing
scene, even the blood of Christ is not sufficient to prevent Frenchie from
being marked and the demon returning from hell.1

Conclusion
The focus on family and faith, the connection of narrative and character to
“true stories” and real people, and some shared stylistic tropes, strengthens a
sense of thematic and aesthetic unity between the films within The Conjuring
universe. Combined with paratextual materials and discourse which evolved
from direct association with James Wan’s work to a more self-contained form
of promotion that nonetheless draws on his established style, the series has
been distanced from the idea of the industry-focused “franchise” to an argu-
ably more appealing narrative “universe” branded with a creative authorial
focus at its center. Richard Nowell (2014) argues that horror scholarship has
often divorced analyses of films and their themes, aesthetics and social con-
texts from the economic concerns that drive the genre’s production, fre-
quently focusing on either text or industry at the cost of ignoring the other.
This article demonstrates one way in which these considerations might be
brought together. The Conjuring universe provides an ideal case study for
connecting texts and context to consider the ways creative choices contribute
to commercial strategies by building storyworlds made up of installments in
dialogue with one other. The franchise has evolved to embody James Wan’s
contemporary gothic brand—a reliably popular contemporary genre staple—
providing opportunities for other filmmakers to connect to the series (and to
capitalize on Wan’s brand by association) and to develop new stories which
find intersections with existing characters and narratives, each installment
contributing to its larger whole. The varied supernatural paraphernalia in the
Warren’s secure room offers countless opportunities for new threads explor-
ing the pair’s case files, with potential for further spin offs via the various
demons, ghosts and monsters they reportedly encountered, while, as The Nun
demonstrates, creative opportunities exist beyond the occult museum for the
universe to keep on growing.

Note
1. The ethical issues arising from The Conjuring films’ claims to be based on the “real
life” case files of the Warrens (specifically in relation to their conservative Christianity)
are addressed by Alexandra West (2020) in her chapter “Onward Christian Soldiers:
Eyes of Believers in The Conjuring (2013) and The Conjuring 2 (2016).”
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 17

ORCID
Laura Mee http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7256-3617

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