If you dig quality scares, there are two moments in the latest installment of the ever-expanding universe of The Conjuring films that will stick with you long after you’ve left the theater. The first is an exquisite long take that lays out the spatial arrangements of the Mullins House, a lovely two-story number in peaceful isolation from society, complete with a dumbwaiter, an electric stairclimber, a toymaker’s workshop and musty evil barn, and an unspeakable curse spanning the years. The second is the introduction of a scarecrow that in its debut scene rivals Friday the 13th Part II's Jason Voorhees for making burlap the most terrifying fucking fabric you can imagine.
It deserves emphasis that while Annabelle: Creation is exponentially better than its genuinely terrible predecessor, it still isn’t all that great. It delivers a few good jump scares and two expert slow burns, and there are some moments that deliver some true jolts — see it with as big a crowd as you can, because shared scares are often the best scares. But it doesn’t deliver on the level of either Conjuring, and they all pale in comparison to Ouija: Origin of Evil. That prequel was the goal for this picture, whereby a dreadful studio offering gets a prequel directed by a talented indie director who does a significant amount of heavy lifting, somehow elevating the franchise just by putting more care and tact into the proceedings. It also limits The Conjuring universe by having everything bound up in a cosmology explicitly tied to Catholic lore.
It doesn’t matter where Annabelle: Conjuring zigs and zags to along the way, because it has to end up with a demons-versus-dogma climax, and it has to end at the beginning of its predecessor. This is the kind of setup that saps a lot of goodwill amongst viewers — not that there’s a religious perspective involved, but rather that it's become predictable. The scripts for the films in The Conjuring universe have always hiccuped their way through the final reel, and this one gets especially sweaty, very close to lazy.
The cast is pretty good, with Stephanie Sigman (who, if you haven’t seen her pageant-contestant-caught-up-in-cartel-drama thriller Miss Bala, you really, really should) as a nun with mysterious Romanian ties to other mysterious nuns, and Lulu Jones, fresh off the aforementioned Ouija prequel, digging deep into the material. And Talitha Bateman, as the disabled girl Janice, delivers a great creepy-kid performance, though this makes the second film wherein director David Sandberg (the deeply problematic feature Lights Out as well as the relentless masterpiece short "Lights Out") implies that disability, or mental illness, is a giant lightning rod for supernatural menace and that being so puts all that one cares about at risk.
Whither Annabelle, you ask? The titular menace is used well — never moving on camera, summoning the cinematic equivalent of subwoofery bowel-clenching just by appearing in the perfect spot. In the pantheon of dangerous dolls, she certainly deserves a place alongside Chucky and Talky Tina. And if she isn’t quite to the level of the latent psychosexual mysteries of Pin: A Plastic Nightmare or the anticolonial assault of Trilogy of Terror’s Zuni doll, there’s still potential, at least judging by the size of the crowd at the Thursday night pre-open late show. With forthcoming films slated for The Nun, The Crooked Man and (surely) now The Scarecrow, we’ve got a squad of monstrous icons champing at the bit to haunt the multiplex. Let’s hope the powers that be skew more toward the strong directorial visions of series stalwart James Wan, and away from the tossed-off cash-grab of the first Annabelle picture. Creation is an improvement, to be sure, but there’s still a ways to go.
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