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I recently had some houseguests, The conjuring came up on movie night, and the guy's girlfriend turned out to be a huge fan. They're competently done horror films, but I was a little bit surprised to find out that she thinks that they're real, and it took an effort of will for me to not go overboard poking holes in the Warrens. So now I've got all these thoughts about The conjuring.
Even in a film that glazes them, you can see the underlying shape of the grift. The mythos doesn't match up with other supernatural fiction, it matches up with the vague folk-Catholicism of a dumb person. Why is Ed Warren, who knows all there is to know about demons and exorcism rituals, less supernaturally potent than a Catholic priest, who probably thinks demons are imaginary? Why only a Catholic priest, why not a minister or a voodoo guy? Why is it relevant that the satanic witch ghost had a relative who was killed in the Salem witch trials? In the universe of The Conjuring, did the witch trials find real witches, rather than it just being a jilted lover and ergot poisoning? Just seems like such a unnecessary story element. Catching an actual witch at a witch trial is usually a punchline, like in Widows Bay or Treehouse of Horror. In the 70s did median American believe the Salem witch trials were real?
When a story is presented as fiction, this kind of inconsistency doesn't bother me as much, I don't ask why Patrick Swayze can walk through walls but not through floors, because ghost doesn't pretend to be a documentary.
Speaking of dumb folk-Catholicism, I was somewhat recently coerced into watching The Nun, which a friend of mine (a lapsed Roman Catholic) described as the scariest horror movie he’d ever seen. I, in contrast, thought it had one of the dumbest plots I’ve ever seen.
They could have just said it's the sweat of Christ and it would have made it work, but by reaching for something that felt more meaningful they basically broke it in a way any Catholic would notice. I wonder if anyone raised the objection during production.
Though I think people who like it don't really care because those movies seem to mostly hit for people who aren't Catholics, but like the demon/witches/exorcisms aesthetics. My wife's like that, she doesn't believe in Christianity but she really wants to believe that stuff like what the Warrens did was real. Because even to atheists, fighting primordial evil is cool, even if wasting time on being lied to in church by hypocritical clergy, being brainwashed to ignore science and hate gays is not (which is what they identify Christianity with).
Some of these religious horror movies try to make it intellectually palatable to believe in the specific Catholic evil, and the power of Catholic rites against it, without believing in the Christian God by making it more of a matter of generic, form changing evil vs a nebulous "force of belief" in general. The last and horrible The Exorcist movie is like that; white voodoo witch doctor rites are powerful against demons too, as long as the person performing it believes. And if it some cases it takes the dramatic form of Catholic demons and Catholic exorcism, then it's just a matter of it being what the character believes.
Anyway, The Nun had nice set designs that made my time watching it not wasted, but otherwise it's not the strongest in that genre by any means.
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