#the conjuring series

[heavenlycinema]

The Conjuring 2013

Dir. James Wan

“Sometimes it's better to keep the genie in the bottle.”

[horrorcryingscreencaps]

[sincerityisscarity]

The Conjuring series are by far my favorite romances to watch. They wouldn’t work as horror if Ed and Lorraine weren’t madly in love with each other but i mean, the way he looks at her

how they hold each other

I’m obsessed with them

[sthefany16]

The Impact of Patrick Wilson on Horror Movies: How Patrick Wilson's Presence Affected the Horror Genre and Why They're So Effective

Patrick Wilson is a versatile actor known for conveying complex emotions and making his characters incredibly realistic. Whether in dramas, musicals or, of course, horror movies, he brings intensity that connects the audience to the characters' emotional conflicts. He has a special talent for bringing everyday heroes to life, exploring a range from skepticism to vulnerability and heroism, making his performances convincing and engaging.

One of Patrick's strengths is his subtle approach. Instead of over-dramatizing or exaggerating expressions, he builds characters in a balanced way, using silent gazes and small nuances that make the audience perceive what he's feeling without needing to say much. (I love the scared face he makes in Insidious 😹🥰) This emotional depth creates a stronger bond with the viewer, who becomes involved in the character's journey.

Patrick Wilson has established himself as a remarkable figure in the horror genre thanks to his ability to bring authenticity and intense presence, elevating suspense and psychological terror in various productions. In movies like "The Conjuring" and "Insidious," Wilson balances his role as a reluctant hero and vulnerable protagonist, bringing humanity that emotionally connects the viewer to what's at stake. This depth makes the stories more realistic and impactful.

The Conjuring is particularly effective due to its constant tension and narrative blend of paranormal investigation and family drama. Patrick, playing investigator Ed Warren, creates a solid emotional foundation that lends credibility to the story and intensifies terror as supernatural events unfold. His chemistry with Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine Warren, further deepens the audience's emotional connection, showing the film is more than just a horror story.

In Insidious, his role as a desperate father trying to save his son from dark forces creates urgency and vulnerability, making the film frightening not only for its supernatural elements but also for the terror of a helpless father, elevating the narrative's impact by conveying both strength and fear.

This talent for balancing emotion and restraint makes Patrick Wilson a magnetic presence, and is part of what makes his characters stand out, especially in horror.

[livingwithhorrors]

Watching the Conjuring movies for the first time.

I’ve listened to the Horror Virgin Podcasts episodes of them and just finally watching them.

I didn’t have interest in it until after all the fun listening to them talk about it and the controversy about the real people.

I just finished listening to The Last Podcast On The Left about the Warrens and decided to dive in today.

Plan to watch the Insidious movies as well cause of Patrick.

I saw him first time when I went to see Phantom of the Opera in theaters.

[yoongisjuicebox]

Sam and Colby Conjuring spoilers

This is so cringey

But this series really opened my mind up more than ever. It changed my perspective on that beautiful house.

It changed my perspective of the spirits there and it even answered my number one question.

Are the ones I've lost, okay?

These boys really put their heart and soul into this series, and I can't even begin to explain the emotions I've felt during this whole series. I can't even imagine how they feel.

Mind is blown

[simp4f1]

So I just watched episode two of The Conjuring Series by Sam&Colby and need to discuss it with someone asap

[shivering-isles-cryptid]

Just remembered my first horror movie. It was the first scream and I watched it when I was 3.

The first horror movie to actually scare me was the OG Child’s Play when I was 7.

The first horror movie I watched on my own volition, without someone putting it in and making me watch, was Ouija

I’m still terrified of Chucky, I find serial killers ridiculous, and demons are a hobby.

No

(When I say I’m scared of Chucky, I mean OG Chucky. The current movies made him a little bitch, and the remake of Childs Play where he’s a robot/ai thing is just weird.)

[theknightlywolfe]

Stopped at Walmart for some cheap craft supplies for a craft I haven't done since I was like 8 yrs old, and they have modern horror movie series collections available. So I picked up a 7 movie Conjuring collection for $20 (no alt tracks, no extras, just the movies but still cheaper than even buying used).

So start up Annabelle: Creation, the one movie in the series I haven't seen and ... I have seen it before. Still going to watch it because I barely remember it.

So I have seen every movie in the series, and just need to see the "set in but not officially part of" La Llorona.

[lowhorrors]

I really enjoyed The Nun 2. It might be my favorite of the Conjuring series... Some spoiler thoughts/reactions under the cut.

The magazine thing! I love it. Whoever thought of that and executed it deserves something shiny and special. It reminds of the tension and cleverness behind that first shadow/painting scene in Conjuring 2 but wasn't a straight repeat. The way the audience at the theater held their breath while those pages were flapping was beautiful.

I thought the goat would be a goat! I was not prepared!

I really love how this one gave some sort of motive and backstory to the demon rather than just the usual "demons doing bad shit for the devil" bit. The reminder that the nun was once an angel, and that demons might crave some of those powers and blessings they lost in the fall? Beautiful.

The halo! The halo of light around the Nun when it devoured that holy power, making the Nun silhouette darker than ever in contrast, before it goes out and those eyes open with the shine!

This movie was visually stunning and really enjoyable. I'm so happy I saw it in theaters.

[shiroandblack]

Things I shouldn't have laughed at while watching The Nun II:

In the first scene when the Father saw smoke rising up from that pillar thingy and it formed a triangle (the white cloth part) of the Nun's nun uniform. I really thought that was an up arrow and was waiting for the camera to give an upward angle. When I realised the smoke formed the Nun, I just couldn't help myself and laughed at my idiocy.

Madame Laurent getting beaten up by that thurible. I don't know about overseas, but where I'm from those are actually quite light, so yeah you'll get a few scratches but not that much. This was enhanced by the comment made by my friend who had been an altar boy in church: "Is she really getting murdered by a thurible?" So yeah, if it's heavy in Europe then I completely understand but where I'm from it's not really heavy which was why we were all kinda "???"

The goat monster. Like the little girl was screaming as it went down the stairs but I couldn't stop laughing at how it was clopping down the stairs.

Sister Debra screaming for a few seconds first before helping the little girl from getting pulled by Madame Laurent. She was so real for that and it was hilarious.

Because my friends and I were confused about the goat. We then read/watched theories about it and the conclusion we made was: the goat demon manifested because the girls kept calling it a demon. So in short, the girls manifested too hard. Which I found pretty funny. We should all learn how to manifest as well as these schoolgirls do.

[heavenlycinema]

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It 2021

Dir. Michael Chaves

“I think I hurt someone.”

[horrorcryingscreencaps]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Against Lore

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: "just add the word 'modified.'"

As in, "Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes."

Jim's big idea was that gun people couldn't help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word "modified" hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer's advantage: a gun person's imagination gnaws at that word "modified," spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person's impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. "Modified" puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter's lies.

Yes, writing is lying. Storytelling is genuinely weird. A storyteller who has successfully captured the audience has done so by convincing their hindbrains to care about the tribulations of imaginary people. These are people whose suffering, by definition, do not matter. Imaginary things didn't happen, so they can't matter. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were less tragic than the death of the yogurt you had for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, whereas R&J never lived, never died, and don't matter:

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

Hijacking a stranger's empathic response is intrinsically adversarial. While storytelling is a benign activity, its underlying mechanic is extremely dangerous. Getting us to care about things that don't matter is how novels and movies work, but it's also how cults and cons work.

Cult leaders and con-artists know that they're engaged in mind-to-mind combat, and they make liberal use of Jim's hack of leaving blank spots for the mark to fill in. Think of Qanon drops: the mystical nonsense was just close enough to sensical that a vulnerable audience was compelled to try and untangle them, and ended up imparting more meaning to them than the hustler who posted them ever could have dreamt up.

Same with cons – there's a great scene in the Leverage: Redemption heist show where an experienced con-artist explains to a novice that the most convincing hustle is the one where you wait for the mark to tell you what they think you're doing, then run with it (scambaiters and other skeptics will recognize this as a relative of the "cold reading," where a "psychic" uses your own confirmations to flesh out their predictions).

As Douglas Adams put it:

A towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Magicians know this one, too. The point of a sleight is to misdirect the audience's attention, and use that moment of misattention to trick them, vanishing, stashing or producing something. The mark's mind is caught in a pleasurable agony: something seemingly impossible just happened. The mind splits into two parts, one of which insists that the impossible just happened, the other insisting that the impossible can't happen.

You know you've done it right if the audience says, "Do that again!" And that's the one thing you must not do. So long as you don't repeat the trick, the audience's imagination will chew on it endlessly, coming up with incredibly clever things that you must have done (a clever conjurer will know several ways to produce the same effect and will "do it again" by reproducing the effect via different means, which exponentially increases the audience's automatic imputation of clever methods to the performer).

Not for nothing, Jim Macdonald advises his writing students to study Magic and Showmanship, a classic text for aspiring conjurers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/11/13/magic-and-showmanship-classic-book-about-conjuring-has-many-lessons-for-writers/

There's a version of this in comedy, too. The scholarship of humor is clear on this: comedy comes from surprise. The audience knows they're about to be surprised when the punchline lands, and their mind is furiously trying to defuse the comedian's bomb before it detonates, cycling through potential punchlines of their own. This ramps up the suspense and the tension, so when the comedian does drop the punchline, the tension is released in a whoosh of laughter.

Your mind wants the tension to be resolved ASAP, but the pleasure comes from having that desire thwarted. Comedy – like most performance – has an element of authoritarianism. You don't give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs.

Same goes for TTRPGs: the game master's role is to deny the players the victories and treasure they want, until they can't take it anymore, and then deliver it. That's the definition of an epic game. It's one of the durable advantages of human GMs over video game back-ends: they can ramp up the epicness by "cheating" on the play, giving the players the chance to squeak out improbable victories at the last possible second:

https://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/03/behind-the-screen.html

This is so effective that even crude approximations of it can turn video-games into cult hits – like Left4Dead, whose "Director" back-end would notice when the players were about to get destroyed and then substantially ramped up the chances of finding an amazing weapon – the chance would still be low overall, but there would be enough moments when the player got exactly what they'd been praying for, at the last possible instant, that it would feel amazing:

https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director#Special_Infected

Critically, Left4Dead's Director didn't do this every time. As any showman knows, the key to a great performance is "Always leave 'em wanting more." The musician's successful finale depends on doing every encore the audience demands, except the last one, so the crowd leaves with one tantalyzing and imaginary song playing in their minds, a performance better than any the musicians themselves could have delivered. Like the gun person who comes up with a cooler mod than the writer ever could, like the magic show attendee who comes up with a more elaborate explanation for the sleight than the conjurer could ever pull off, like the comedy club attendee whose imagination anticipates a surprise that grows larger the longer the joke goes on, the successful performance is an adversarial act of cooperation where the audience willingly and unwillingly cooperates with the performer to deny them the thing that they think they need, and deliver the thing they actually need.

This is my biggest problem with the notion that someday LLMs will get good enough at storytelling to give us the tales we demand, without having to suffer through a storyteller's sadistic denial of the resolutions we crave. When I'm reading a mystery, I want to turn to the last page and find out whodunnit, but I know that doing so will ruin the story. Telling the storyteller how the story should go is like trying to tickle yourself.

Like being tickled, experiencing only fun if the tickler respects your boundaries – but, like being tickled, there's always a part where you're squirming away, but you don't want it to stop. An AI storyteller that gives you exactly what you want is like a dungeon master who declares that every sword-swing kills the monster, and every treasure chest is full of epic items and platinum pieces. Yes, that's what you want, but if you get it, what's the point?

Seen in this light, performance is a kind of sado-masochism, where the performer delights in denying something to the audience, who, in turn, delights in the denial. Don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need.

What your audience needs is their own imagination. Decades ago, I was a freelance copywriter producing sales materials for Alias/Wavefront, a then-leading CGI firm that was inventing all kinds of never-seen VFX that would blow people away. One of the engineers I worked with told me something I never forgot: "Your imagination has more polygons than anything you can create with our software." He was talking about why it was critical to have some of the action happen in the shadows.

All of this is why series tend to go downhill. The first volume in any series leaves so much to the imagination. The map of the world is barely fleshed out, the characters' biographies are full of blank spots, the mechanics of the artifacts and the politics of the land are all just detailed enough that your mind automatically ascribes a level of detail to them, without knowing what that detail is.

This is the moment at which everything seems very clever, because your mind is just churning with all the different bits of elaborate lore that will fill in those lacunae and make them all fit together.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm about to give some spoilers for Furiosa.

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FURIOSA SPOILERS AHEAD!

Last night, we went to see Furiosa, the latest Mad Max movie, a prequel to 2015's Fury Road, which is one of the greatest movies ever made. Like most prequels, Furiosa functions as a lore-delivery vehicle, and as such, it's nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Fury Road hints as so much worldbuilding. We learn about the three fortresses of the wasteland (the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gastown) but we only see one (The Citadel). We learn that these three cities have a symbiotic relationship with one another, defined by a complex politics that is just barely stable. We meet Furiosa herself, and learn something of her biography – that she had been stolen from the Green Place, that she had suffered an arm amputation.

All of this is left for us to fill in, and for a decade, my hindbrain has been chewing on all of that, coming up with cool ways it could all fit together. I yearned to know the "real" explanation, but it was always unlikely that this real explanation would be as enjoyable as my own partial, ever-unfinished headcanon.

Furiosa is a great movie, but its worst parts are the canonical lore it settles. Partly, that's because some of that lore is just stupid. Why is the Bullet Farm an open-pit mine? I mean, it's visually amazing, but what does that have to do with making bullets? Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal – the solarpunk Green Place is a million times less cool than I had imagined it. Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal and stupid: the scenes where Furiosa's arm is crushed, then severed, then replaced, are both rushed and quasi-miraculous:

https://www.themarysue.com/how-does-furiosa-lose-her-arm/

But even if the lore had been good – not stupid, not banal – the best they could have hoped for was for the lore to be tidy. If it were surprising, it would seem contrived. A story whose loose ends have been tidily snipped away seems like it would be immensely satisfying, but it's not satisfying – it's just resolved. Like the band performing every encore you demand, until you no longer want to hear the band anymore – the feeling as you leave the hall isn't satisfaction, it's exhaustion.

So long as some key question remains unresolved, you're still wanting more. So long as the map has blank spots, your hindbrain will impute clever and exciting mysteries, tantalyzingly teetering on the edge of explicability, to the story.

Lore is always better as something to anticipate than it is to receive. The fans demand lore, but it should be doled out sparingly. Always leave 'em wanting more.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

[srawilson]

I agree!!! Patrick Wilson is People's #SexiestManAlive 2025 @peoplemag #PatrickWilsonSexiestManAlive2025 #TheConjuring #aquaman #VeraFarmiga #PATRICKWILSON

I agree too, it's about time he was on the cover of this magazine🛐🛐🛐 @peoplemag

(Photos are not mine)

[conjured-clown]

@somerandomdudelmao Thank you for giving a hyper fixation to my hyper fixation 🥺🥰