Hollywood Horror Movies | The Conjuring

I waited a while to write this post in hopes that I would get a chance to see this movie again before I wrote about it, but alas the the time and the budget of a graduate student can only stretch so far. So I will attempt to write this about some of the things that struck me about this movie and what horror psychology is at play in this movie that made it so scary.

First lets talk about what type of horror this movie is. This is one that I haven’t covered yet in my Types of Horror series, but would fall under what would be be called the Horror of the Other. Under this type of horror falls the ideas of possession and the quintessential ghost story (think M.R. James). Essentially the horror of the Other is when meaning breaks down because one comes to discover that their idea of Self and is not the contained individual they thought they were, but rather they have what philosopher Charles Taylor called a “porous” self. We are open to forces outside of us, often beyond our control, and as is the case in the The Conjuring, are demonic. The thought that one becomes nothing more than a puppet is truly terrifying. The Conjuring really drives this point home with the little side story of the haunted doll Annabelle.

Annabelle. This was one of the creepiest parts in the whole movie for me. This doll is much creepier than the real life Annabelle though (yes it actually exists!).                                           Photo from Box Office Mojo

In the story we are told that the doll is not actually what the demon wants to inhabit, but rather it is just a conduit. It will then use that to take the next step and gain further control in the world to spread more misery and suffering. This is exactly what happens to the mother of our family stuck in the haunted house. The demon Bathsheba merely wants to posses long enough to kill children and then its host.  It is interesting to note that another type of horror is then taken on, after the possession is in place, and that is the horror of personality. The monster is no longer out there, as it was for so much of the movie, but now it is “in here with me”. This bring us back around to the horror of personality, things that are supposed to be incorruptible are viciously maimed and nearly destroyed, such as hearth and home, but most especially motherhood and a mother’s bond to her child.

The demonic possession is part of what makes this movie scary, but I think what really tips the scales for us is the cognitive dissonance that it creates with some of our base rules of the universe. The strongest of these is the violation about what is deserved for being good or bad. This movie was very different from other haunted house movies in that you are genuinely meant to like all of the characters. This isn’t like the Shining, where Jack is already so full of flaws that it is easy to see how he turns monstrous, nor The Haunting where each of the characters seems to have some unlikable element to them, or Amityville Horror (another Warren Case) where we realize how much of a douche the dad really is. We don’t even have the randy and promiscuous teenagers of the slasher films, who always seem to die mid-coitus to have some kind of justified suffering. The family in this movie is a good archetypal nuclear family, with no large character flaws. What makes this movie leave you with the dirt-taste in your mouth is that they just don’t deserve any of what happened. This upsets us, it throws off what we have come to expect from horror movies, (although we saw used with great success in the Exorcist as well).

However what makes this one of the great Hollywood horror movie for me (and it has moved up into my top 3) was that it could not do what it did without the rich and full history of all the other horror movies as a backdrop. There were tributes left and right to all of the great horror movies.Even the title cards were a harking back to movies like Rosemary’s Baby or the Omen. Going back to practical effects, and basic story telling is what brought this movie in. It made us scared of the dark again. It played on simple fears like, what bumps under our bed, creepy basements, what is in the closet, or my 3 year old’s personal favorite what is hiding in the darkest shadow in the room.

Nope…Nope…Nope. This part still freaks me out
Photo from trailer.

This was one of best horror movies I have seen in a long time and it really brought back the elemental experience of horror that I had as a kid and thought I would never quite get back. It was an excellent piece of work, and a great addition to any horror movie library. Lets hope the success that this movie saw in the box office will give producers faith in really well done horror movies as a viable project. I am looking at you Del Toro I still have my fingers crossed from ATMOM.

Horror Psychology| “Based on a True Story”

My inspiration for this horror psychology post came because I went to see The Conjuring opening weekend. I was very impressed. With this blog I really haven’t done movie reviews in the normal sense and I am not going to start now, but there is a reason that it is now the 10th most grossing horror movie of all time and just knocked The Haunting down to 11th place, and moved into my top 3. The simple reason to this was 1 practical effects, they win over CGI every time, and 2 great story telling. Any way that is neither here nor there as far as what this post is about. I will write my usual analysis of the movie later. What this post is about is the tagline on this movie.

I have never really thought twice about the little phrases like this one that appear on movies.Sure, when I see it I usually go look up to see just how much the movie has fictionalized, but I am never expecting to find something earth-shattering (I think I was jaded though after Mothman Prophecies, yeah the bridge really did fall, but the Mothman had not been seen in decades. Lame! ) Anyway, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine on Facebook about the movie and why she was really nervous to go see it. We had a very interesting conversation, but what was most interesting was the fact that part of what really scared her was the tag line. As she explained it, horror movies don’t bother her all that much except when they say they are based on  true story. The reason being is that with all the others she can always tell herself that it is just a fantasy, but when they say they are true it becomes something different. Dread enters the picture. Dread of the idea that if even only some of the things she sees happened to real people then some of it could really happen to her.

This idea stuck with me ,I think often when we engage in horror we knowingly enter a darker realm.A lot of the time though the sheer exaggeration of it all helps us to understand that this hyper exposure is not real. But what happens when it does become real? This is a fascinating area of horror psychology. What is going on inside a person when the things  you always took for fantasy transgress or even violently tear their way into ones reality? How does one deal with that, is it as simple as the kind of re-configuring that goes one when one experiences existential dread that happen much more subtly  in the presence of “art-horror”? Personally I think it would be a lot more traumatic, having seen people experience this, such as when my brother freaked out when on a daytime-recon of an area I was going to be investigating for a haunting, and we heard disembodied voices. It raises a question within myself, why didn’t I freak out? That experience was definitely a first for me as well, but it did not have the marked effect that it had on my brother. I think I have stumbled upon one my new horror psychology topics, good thing too as I now have a dissertation topic to start thinking about.

What are your thoughts? Have you ever had an experience where fantasy has transgressed into reality? What happened and how did you handle it? What about the tag lines like  “Based on a true story”, does that cause you to have different emotions or thoughts about the story? And as always question are welcome.