For some, we may rejoice, for the most basic, anodyne, by-the-numbers horror franchise of the current millennium is finally (supposedly) coming to an end. With this weekend’s release of The Conjuring: Last Rites, the original series in the mega-franchise birthed with James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013) is at last concluding. Well, at least according to the marketing. As we know from Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter et al, “final” entries are rarely that.
Series Rapidly Dropped in Quality
Wan’s original Conjuring was a nifty haunted house thriller which benefited from a surprisingly starry cast, including franchise veterans Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga playing real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, respectively. They were joined by Ron Livingston and a super-game Lili Taylor as the couple beset by supernatural horrors in their new home. It was a fun and spooky summer flick, with a great hide-and-seek set piece and an over-the-top, knowingly silly finale in which a possessed Taylor vomits copious blood and obscenities at once.
The low-budget affair earned big bucks at the box office, and on the heels of Wan’s own Insidious (the sequel to which hit screens only weeks after The Conjuring) the 2013 film basically created the quiet-quiet-bang genre of horror films which replace exciting plot and characterization with patches of silence followed by a predictable BANG in the place of a proper, thoughtful, or effective scare. Insidious 2 showed where The Conjuring series would go. Wan’s first Insidious was a silly carnival ride ghost flick; the sequel was mostly characters roaming dark corridors. Almost instantly, The Conjuring flicks fell into the same comatose routine.
Rapidly, The Conjuring became a Marvel-like extended universe, with spin-offs Annabelle (2014) and The Nun (2018) receiving sequels while others, like The Curse of La Llorona (2019), came and went. The Conjuring 2 was a dreadful bore, with Wan returning and aspiring to create some sort of Citizen Kane of horror movies but instead fashioning an overcooked, utterly goofy soap opera. The second sequel, 2021’s The Devil Made Me Do It, is completely forgettable.
Last Rites is More of the Same
And now we have Last Rites (and please, let it be the last), which has earned a fairly respectable but, once you dig into it, relatively confusing 63 percent critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes. There is perhaps no other franchise that cares less to be any fun at all. Loud, sudden noises (though they’re feverishly predictable at this point) are not scary, nor classic horror. They’re just kind of annoying, and totally lazy. And beyond the aggressive sound design, all these movies have up their sleeve are shots of goofy-looking demons before a de rigueur finale in which everything goes haywire, Vera Farmiga gets tossed across a room and shot with glass, and Patrick Wilson holds a crucifix to the sky. It’s the same thing every single time, and it only sorta worked the first time. This is directed by franchise veteran Michael Chaves, who directed The Devil Made Me Do It, La Llorona,and The Nun II (2023)–so, three of the franchise’s most forgettable movies.
It will surprise no one, then, that Last Rites follows the exact same structure. It’s a ceaseless and utterly tiresome movie, not to mention a sinful bore. If Last Rites were a birthday party guest, you’d end the night early just to escape their presence and avoid another meandering story that’s exactly the same as the last. In this one, the Warrens team up with their daughter, Judy (a committed Mia Tomlinson), who possesses her mother’s psychic abilities, and her boyfriend, Tony (Ben Hardy), to defeat a demon who’s harassing yet another family, this time through a possessed mirror. There are myriad callbacks to all of the other films in the franchise, but since all of them blend together, you’ll have one helluva time making sense of anything. This is, along with this summer’s I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel, probably the biggest example of filmmakers overestimating how much the fanbase cares about the details of a routine horror flick.
As always, Wilson and Farmiga bring much more to these movies than is required. (Farmiga’s equally talented sister, Taissa Farmiga, a franchise mainstay, also has a role here.) More frustrating than the limp pace, the ludicrously indulgent 135-minute running time, and the predictable set pieces is the complete waste of a talented cast. The best part about The Conjuring movies coming to an end (and please, please let that be true) will be that Wilson and the Farmiga sisters can go on to work which is worthy of their talent.
Franchise Feels Out of Time With Current Horror
As the franchise concludes, the lasting feeling left by the Conjuring films is a stale nostalgia. In an era where directors like Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger are deepening the genre with radically entertaining and subversive films like Get Out andWeapons, and filmmakers like Coralie Fargeat (The Substance) and Michael Shanks (Together) are using body-horror to satirize everything from love to misogyny, films like The Conjuring, Annabelle, and especially The Nun (the worst, and dullest, of all the spin-offs) seem not just outdated but juvenile. While Last Rites makes a strenuous but admittedly good-hearted effort to close the series out with an emotional punch, it ends just as many other installments in the franchise have: with a bang and a yawn.
