Comparisons with "The Amityville Horror" are, of course, inevitable but
James Wan's "The Conjuring "is the better and the more frightening film.
Based, apparently, on a real-life haunting this is as good a haunted
house movie as you're likely to get. Wan knows how to spook us with a
highly imaginative use of sound, (things that go bump in the night have
never made as much noise as they do here), and there are several decent
shock moments spread liberally through the film from the
start. Whether you choose to believe everything you see on the screen,
of course, is entirely up to you; I'm inclined to think that Hollywood
as much as the Devil was behind the best scare scenes.
The one question the film singularly fails to answer with any degree of assurance is why the hell didn't they just get out of there and not stop running until they reached the next State. I think if I was being dragged around the room by the hair by an unseen, malevolent force I would move out as fast as my legs would carry me even if it meant living in a shoe-box in the middle of a motorway. Convincingly played, too, by everyone with Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson doing a nice line in sexy ghost-hunters, (they are certainly a lot better-looking than their real-life equivalents). Indeed, Wilson is weathering the years so well I'm beginning to wonder if he isn't possessed by the somewhat less than malevolent spirit of Adonis.
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