Save for a single scene nearly an hour in, 2019’s The Curse of La Llorona bears no real connection to the franchise it purports to expand. The story of a single mother and social worker whose world is torn apart when a sinister presence begins to torment her children, the film seems nothing short of standard horror fare rife with polished genre conventions and lots of grating sound design – until a familiar face appears. That familiar face is Tony Amendola’s Father Perez, a key figure in 2014’s Annabelle – but for what reason?
The Curse of La Llorona marks something essential in understanding Warner Brothers’ Conjuring franchise, and indeed the larger landscape of studio franchise and shared universe filmmaking – the moment when it stops caring or mattering. This is the sixth of eight films under the broader Conjuring franchise umbrella, the fourth spin-off, the third adjacent sub-franchise, and the first to be wholly devoid of a purpose as such; a wholly vapid exercise in studio-authored filmmaking as content creation.
The Conjuring, the franchise, was born in the summer of 2013 with the James Wan film of the same name. It remains a compelling piece of horror-as-tentpole filmmaking, accomplished if stylistically lacking, and with all the right instincts. Emotion and fine craftsmanship remain, vitally, the underpinnings of its most frightening (and occasionally loud and overwrought – forebearers of the eventual spin-offs’ worst qualities) moments. It received a sequel in 2016, a much shaggier but still worthwhile pop thriller despite its predilection for remixing, rather than reinventing, the formula of its predecessor. Another sequel, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, followed in 2021.
The shared universe (or content brand) was born in 2014 with the release of Annabelle, which expands the doll’s establishment in the opening passage of The Conjuring into the first in a line of spin-offs. Annabelle lacks the clear conceptual pull of The Conjuring (an adaptation of the real Warrens’ case files) and its technical precision. Its only real identity is as an explanation, rather than expansion – as if a wiki fansite article for Annabelle had been conjured to celluloid by some dark magic. Gone are the impeccably structured set-pieces and clear sense of rhythm that lent the first film its robust thrills, in their place only a far cruder imitation justified by the promise of financial success.
The basic premise is as follows: a young couple – John and Mia – purchase the loveliest horrifying doll you’ll ever see in preparation for the baby they’re expecting, and strange things begin to happen. It is Southern California, circa 1967 and this achingly milquetoast vision of the American family-to-be is threatened by whisperings of cult violence. If the plot sounds convoluted, that’s because it is; and moreover, if the names John and Mia ring a bell (Cassavettes and Farrow, anyone?), it’s because they’re a single hat-nod to the material being lazily reproduced.
Indeed, rather than following the simple narrative thread of “cursed doll haunts its owners to insanity,” director John R. Leonetti (who lensed not only the first Conjuring, but two other films about cursed dolls, as well – Child’s Play 3 and Dead Silence, and yet can’t seem to muster a single means of making Annabelle scary) spins the film into a bafflingly convoluted riff on Rosemary’s Baby that makes the implicit dread of that film boringly explicit. Gone are the marital tension and harrowing portrait of heteropatriarchy and flattened is the looming threat of the cult. But most confoundingly, Annabelle is largely cast to the backdrop of her own film.
What Annabelle does offer is a blueprint for the way that its sequels and other Conjuring offshoots will remix parts of Wan’s original as the flimsy DNA for franchise expansion. Key among these are a focus on family and a generally slick, though often awkward in execution, pop thriller style of horror. Though critically lambasted – and with good reason – Annabelle was a resounding box office success. It earned itself a sequel and no doubt motivated the expansion of The Conjuring and its first offshoot franchise into a full-blown shared universe.
Its sequel, Annabelle: Creation, attempts to polish away the stain its predecessor left on the franchise’s reputation. A prequel of sorts, it pushes the franchise back to clearer waters by replacing Leonetti behind the camera with a filmmaker who, like Wan, was already something of an established horror craftsman. I say craftsman because, though Annabelle: Creation is a marked improvement over its predecessor and David F. Sandberg is ostensibly a superior filmmaker, it verges on horror-as-showreel filmmaking. That is, its steady insistence on slow burns and suspense evinces a hollowness that feels reminiscent of its predecessor.
Creation begins in 1943 with the literal creation of the doll that will become Annabelle and the death of the dollmaker’s daughter (guys, it’s about trauma!). The brunt of its action then follows in 1955 as the bereaved and his now ailing wife take in a nun and several girls from a shuttered orphanage. Unsurprisingly to anyone, the doll has attained sinister baggage in the 12 years following its creation and, as the young girls begin to explore rooms of the house consigned away to grief, they find more than just figurative skeletons in closets.
Its setpieces are clearly more deliberate and economical than those of the previous film – and as with The Conjuring before it, there is a focus on games (there, hide and clap; here, hide and seek) as scene-setters for terror, and family and grief as a steadfast emotional backbone. But its shift back toward what worked in The Conjuring to prove that the IP is learning and growing from criticism feels dismayingly slavish; despite a shift in time periods and an entirely new cast of characters, Creation feels devoid of its own identity.
What it does for The Conjuring shared universe, though, is significant: with now two “main” films and one spin-off behind it, it asserts that this will be a franchise that channels tried and true horror subgenres into offshoots about the various demons and unlikable (to say the least) entities that populate the lives of the Warrens. Where The Conjuring was an exorcism movie and Annabelle a cult movie, Creation is a haunted house film, plain and simple. Mercifully, it also leaves shameless cribbing from genre classics in the dust.
Creation is followed by a sequel and a pair of spin-offs – one a Conjuring 2 offshoot and the other entirely separate – that exemplify this id: Annabelle Comes Home, The Nun, and the already discussed The Curse of La Llorona.
The Nun, though aesthetically appreciable, marks a return to the Annabelle brand of Conjuring films – insufferably loud rather than frightening, and seemingly interminable. Its premise is so simple as to hardly warrant introduction: it’s about nuns. More precisely, one (demonic) nun, a novitiate, a priest, and a man whose only characteristic is “very horny.” Tragically, they don’t walk into a bar. They do walk into a convent in decay, which provides the film a number of moody, gothic images that might offer something exciting were the film not so interested in warping its welcomely simple concept into the most grueling experience imaginable.
That visual identity is key – though The Nun is ultimately mired by the same overly loud, jumpscare heavy brand of horror-as-excess as Annabelle, it brings to the table an often-pleasurable flavor of Hammer Horror or Mario Bava’s “Black Sunday.” But it also reveals a hollowness not specific to The Nun but to the larger franchise as a whole.
It seems at this point that The Conjuring’s shared universe lacks purpose or drive; there are stories to be told, and a will to tell (profit from) them, but rarely a will for them to feel distinct or stylistically, formally, and narratively coherent. Each becomes a stepping stone toward a fuller Conjuring cinematic universe, and as that The Nun is revealing, but also reductive. Like Annabelle before it, what once was a sinister component of a largely entertaining sequel, the nun in The Conjuring 2 now becomes less a component of a larger film than a gesture toward future profit.
As a prologue to a fuller film, Annabelle felt like respectable spin-off fodder. But The Nun communicates that no part of storytelling is sacred and even a cohesive and moving film like The Conjuring 2 can be reduced to a Marvel-ized teaser for future films. That its other memorable figure of evil, The Crooked Man, is still set to star in his own spin-off speaks volumes, too.
Annabelle Comes Home, though less critically lauded, is a more successful endeavor. Essentially, it’s the platonic ideal of the Conjuring spin-off: directly, but not forcefully, tied to the main saga, and enjoyably trivial/trivially enjoyable as a side course. Following the doll snafu outlined in the opening of The Conjuring, Annabelle resides in the Warrens’ artifact room – until the curious friend of a babysitter unwittingly releases her to wreak havoc. Like its predecessors, Annabelle Comes Home is transparent in its inspirations and loosely ruminates on grief as a scene-setter for horror. But welcomely, it is also airy enough to breathe and light enough not to sink.
Its identity is clear – this is an 80s-inspired teen horror that wants some part of you to feel you’ve been transported to a multiplex before the days of franchise entertainment – and adhered to. Its set-pieces are simple and obvious in construction, but more often than not enjoyable. It isn’t here to move you or wow you or make you feel you’ve been transformed as a person, but it is here to (quite successfully) lull you into the feeling that maybe spin-off movies can still feel like something new.
Annabelle Comes Home finds a tempo that every other spin-off attempt has missed, particularly The Curse of La Llorona. That film’s problems are much the same as the worst of Annabelle and The Nun – but beyond them it is also an utterly grueling watch with no clear purpose. Save for a brief cameo from an Annabelle character, it has no discernible connection to the larger Conjuring universe and as such explodes the formerly un-or-minimally questioned idea of the franchise as a whole.
It is loud, rife with unpleasant jump scares, and built on appropriated folktales and concerning ethnic stereotypes. Plotwise, it never puts forth a single idea or theme, let alone anything cohesive or compelling, nor does it even care to justify its existence as an entity or as a part of something larger. This is the latest in a franchise now well past the billion-dollar mark in worldwide gross; it has no need for anyone to understand its existence – people will watch it all the same.
But what does it mean for a franchise unlike Marvel, DC, or Star Wars’ respective shared universes, where cataclysmic occurrences regularly rattle the status quo that frames all installments and spin-offs, to occupy its own shared universe? Is the “universe” of The Conjuring, as an adaptation of real-life paranormal investigators’ stories, not ostensibly our own?
The Curse of La Llorona is deeply silly as both a film and franchise unit because it so transparently does not matter. Its events have no bearing on future or past installments, and they have no bearing on it. It is entirely static. Audiences pay to see it, and some of the revenue from its hundred-plus-million-dollars box office draw will fund another spin-off of equally laughable insignificance. Will it be about Bloody Mary? Mothman? Bigfoot? Whichever malevolent urban legend it stars, one thing feels guaranteed: it will feel like a ninety-minute hunk of nothingness, and a vaguely familiar face from one of the five other spin-offs you never saw will appear to tie it all together. Characters – beloved or otherwise – will perish grizzly deaths, but they matter not: the franchise is eternal.
