A lone little girl in a cherry red night gown sits in the corner of her dreary room, shivering. She knows he’s back again — that thing that’s been calling to her with a rumbly voice from the shadows while she sleeps. It’s been there night after night, haunting her family, and spouting a cacophony of slanders and hideous thoughts. Now, it’s back again — she can feel it. As she sits and trembles, waiting for that sinister spirit to make himself known to her yet again, her eyes open wide with fear as she witness her most petrifying event yet. To her horror, she watches as all of the dozens crosses posted on her walls slowly turn, one by one, upside down,until each of them is completely inverted. Her head swivels from left to right, following the wave of evil across her room, until the pattern stops, right in the muddiest patch of darkness. Suddenly, a vicious entity springs out at her from the black, lunging with decayed arms at the girl, outstretched as if to snatch her up and pull her back into the dark with him. The little girl screams and jumps backward, but even as she backs away, pushing and kicking with all of her might, it’s clear that she has nowhere to go but up against the wall. She’s trapped, unable to escape her predator, because you can’t outrun a ghost, especially when it’s in your very own home.

These may seem like the undeniable markings of paranormal activity, but for director James Wan, it’s just another day on the set of his new film, The Conjuring 2.

The set itself is extremely impressive. As opposed to settling for exterior shots of a randomly chosen house and shooting all of the interior shots in individual rooms set up on a stage, the entire two story Hodgson house is built onto a stage on the Warner Bros. lot, and every room in the house is used for shooting and modeled after the Hodgson house in Enfield, England. The detail of the interior of the house is so extensive that walking through the house feels less like strolling through a set piece and more like sauntering down the infected halls of the haunted house on 284 Green Street in Enfield. The pale, rotting walls look discolored sickly, like they’re infected with the spirit that haunts them. The living room features a sad little Christmas tree and other spare Christmas decorations, all somewhat pitiful attempts at holiday cheer in the midst of horrifying possession.

Not only is the house built in its entirety with tons of detail, but it also has a house built next door to it on the lot, and both houses have front and backyards. A built in rain system allows for the illusion of rainfall that actually looks real. The drainage system allows for the rain to fall on the set, fall into the gutters, and be recycled up into the rainfall again, so there isn’t any wasting of water. The tiny backyard is speckled with brown dirt, and features a small swing set and an old shed, with a dirty soccer ball to boot. An entrance to the basement beneath the house lingers adjacent to the swing set, with hard concrete steps leading down into the darkness below. It’s just a pair of stairs, but somehow, they seem to lead to something much more dangerous, like some monumental event might happen to members of the Hodgson family at some point down there.

The highly anticipated sequel to his 2013 box office smash hit The Conjuring, The Conjuring 2 brings back Ed and Lorraine Warren, and follows the true story of an alleged haunting at a council house in Brimsdown, Enfield England during the late 1970s, officially known as the Enfield Poltergeist.

It all started with two little girls no older than thirteen crying spirits, and ended with more than thirty different witnesses acknowledging they had experienced some sort of supernatural phenomena. It began on August 30th of 1972, when British police received a phone call from a hysterical Peggy Hodgson, who reported her children’s claims about moving furniture and strange, sinister voices coming from seemingly nowhere in the night. Police came to check out the scene, and though they ultimately determined that there were no arrests to be made, a female officer did report a chair moving of its own accord; sliding about four feet across the floor. Thinking perhaps the floor was at an angle, the officer put a marble on the same spot to see if it would roll, but it did not.

Over the next few months, 284 Green Street became a mad house. With police and reporters constantly shuffling in and out of the place, the Hodgson home came to resemble more of that of a circus than the living quarters of a single parent and her four children. Several news outlets covered the strange events which occurred day and night in the home, including the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, and even BBC News. Journalists reported flying legos, marbles, and chairs, which were flung around like the room as if by some unseen spirit, and also inexplicable knocking on the walls and ceilings. Photographic evidence was recorded of the children levitating, and those brave enough to spend the night in the home say they were flung from their beds in the night. All of the children, Margaret, Janet, Johnny and Billy, were petrified, but no one was targeted more than eleven-year-old Janet. An old man named Bill Wilkins who had lived and died in the house many years before came to speak through Janet for several hours at a time in a rough, grumpy tone, displaying a voice much older than Janet’s, which would have destroyed Janet’s vocal chords had she actually been the one who was putting it on. Bill would terrorize poor little Janet, plaguing her with night terrors and forcing her to emit horrible curses well beyond her years. Janet would go into violent trances, which no one seemed able to pull her out of, lashing about until she was in physical pain. Her mother tried her best to soothe her, and sought help from several paranormal investigators, including Ed and Lorraine Warren, but it wasn’t until years later when a priest visited the family that the spirits of the house came to a dull roar. According to the family, the spirits never quite left the house, they only became less active, but were still always present. Janet left home at age sixteen and married early.

Naysayers argue that many of the events were fabricated by the girls, who were caught bending spoons by hand, and hiding the reporters’ tape recorders. Some say that Janet merely put on the deep voice that resembled old Bill Wilkins, in order to gain fame and money, despite the fact that no money was ever officially received by the family for all of their torment. Others argue that all of the claims of levitation can be easily explained through the breaking down of the photographs, which suggest that Janet could have used her bed as a springboard to lift her into the air, which is when the photographs would have been taken, before she hit the ground again. Janet later admitted that she did make up some of her claims, which led to people calling the whole thing a giant hoax. However, as an adult, Janet has said that out of all of the paranormal events that plagued her home, that she made up only about 2% of what was recorded, and the rest was real. She says she experienced a poltergeist.

So what’s the true story? What really happened in that house on Green Street all of those years ago? Was an innocent family haunted by angry spirits? Did Old Man Wilkins really possess little Janet Hodgson and use her body to speak on his behalf? Or were a couple of little kids just extremely bored with their lives and looking for attention? In James Wan’s new movie, The Conjuring 2, that’s exactly what he sets out to discover.

Demonologist and trance medium Ed and Lorraine Warren are back again and on the case, played again by Wan favorites Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. This time, they face a greater challenge than ever before, as they take on one of the most famous hauntings in recorded history: The Enfield Poltergeist.

When asked about stepping back into the iconic role of Lorraine Warren, Vera Farmiga had this to say: “It feels like yesterday. I’m very close with Patrick [Wilson] and James [Wan]. So just partnering up with Patrick is really like stepping into your old comfy pair of shoes. He’s a good friend. He’s a very, very good friend. His wife is one of my best friends. So that closeness, I think, lends itself to that familiarity. And we have a blast doing it.”

Patrick Wilson, too, is excited to get back into the swing of things again. “It’s nice to be back with my Lorraine, my wifey.” Despite the overall excitedness of coming back for a second entry, Patrick wants to make it clear that no one involved is simply looking for a paycheck. The momentum that drove the first film is still alive and well this time around. “We dug in deep and so we’re doing the same for the second, so we don’t feel that sense of like, we’re just coming back because it’s a sequel, you know?” When asked if it was the horror genre that kept Wilson coming back to more frightening content, Wilson replied, “Really it’s just James [Wan]. We have a great time together.”

Clearly, Frances O’Connor, who plays Peggy Hodgson, also had a swell time with James Wan on set, as she even went as far as to compare him to one of the most iconic filmmakers of the century. “In a weird way I think he kind of reminds me of Spielberg when I was working on A.I. He’s just so into cinema and telling story and it’s very infectious I think.” Added O’Connor about Wan, “He’s just on top of all of it. I feel like he kind of edits in his head. I think [Steven] Spielberg does that a lot too. He just seems very calm too. He also just has that love of it, I think. He just loves being on set. It’s just a nice environment to be in. Even if it gets stressful, it’s motivating, I think, for actors.”

Even little Madison Wolfe, who’s playing younger sister Janet Hodgson, had nothing but positive things to say about working with Wan: “He’s great. He’s so nice. Since it’s a horror film, I kind of expected the energy on set to be kind of dark and weird, but it’s just the opposite. Everyone is so nice.”

“I’m not a Catholic, but when I’d Ed, I’m a Catholic” remarks Patrick Wilson about his real life character Ed Warren. To Wilson, it’s very important to embody his character to the fullest extent. “I did have to go back and look at my performance and relook at [it]” says Wilson. “I got a lot more Ed Warren, like, DVDs and some CDs, and just a lot of tapes, so I could just kind of hear him talk again and sort of get back into him.” Wilson even spoke with Ed’s son-in-law Tony Spiro, since Ed passed away in 2006, and isn’t available for questioning. “I would sort of pick his brain about, you know, quirky little things that he’d do” Wilson explained before adding fondly of his character that he “was always a very pragmatic guy.”

Despite the fact that Ed Warren was a demonologist and a firm believer in the paranormal, he was not about gimmicks, and would be the first to point out if a suspicious situation could be explained through natural causes. Because of his logical approach to supernatural situations, Ed took it to heart when people tried to tell him he was reporting on hoaxes. “It reminded me a lot of, I remember when listening to Buzz Aldrin, when someone was talking about a conspiracy of, that it was a hoax, that they couldn’t stand on the moon, and he was like, ‘You can not tell me I didn’t stand on the moon’, and that’s kind [of] Ed” says Wilson sympathetically. He takes it very personally when someone doesn’t believe him, because he believes it, and he’s got such conviction, and that’s always good to play. So we’ve pushed that in this, moments where you don’t believe, because if you know the Enfield story, you know it’s a little loose. It wasn’t all neat and tidy.”

Just as Patrick Wilson feels close to his character, Vera Farmiga, too, is very fond of her character Lorraine Warren, the real life trance medium, and wife of the late Ed Warren. “We’re very close with Lorraine, she’s a good friend of mine” says Farmiga. “We went to go visit her this summer. I suppose that closeness to her also helps me with the role. She’s a phone call away. I know her well, by now. So it’s certainly…it feels like a switch I can flip on.”

For some actors, the notion of portraying a character who is based on a real person may seem daunting, especially if that actor is actually close friends with the person he or she is playing. However, Farmiga doesn’t find portraying her friend as the most difficult aspect of her performance, but rather, playing her at the correct age. “I think what’s challenging for me is [laughs], she’s in her late eighties now, I’m talking to a very latter version of her. So my tendency is to want to embody all that eccentricity of her age and wisdom, but everything has changed. I’m playing a forty year old and she’s in her eighties. Those are things that affect your speech and your breath, and your gait, the way you move through space. The hardest thing for me is to really disassociate the two and rewind the time to see what the younger woman was like.” Farmiga went on to say that she doesn’t feel intimidated by the fact that she’s dealing with real life cases, but that she’s more concerned with staying true in her depiction of Lorraine. “I don’t feel a pressure. I can only bring to it what I know to be true, my experience of Lorraine” Farmiga says carefully. “And she is so heartfelt, she’s so full of grace, so compassionate as a human being. I love her, I find her to be very beautiful and I’m touched by that. If that comes with any pressure or scrutiny, I can only apply myself.”

In the first Conjuring film, the idea of Ed and Lorraine having to leave their own child behind to go and take care of other families is lightly touched upon as the spirit taunting them at the Perrins finds its way into the Warrens’ home and begins tormenting their own daughter, if only briefly. However, it seems that this theme of painfully leaving their own child behind to go take care of another seems like it will be much more prominent in the sequel. When describing her character Janet’s relationship with the Warrens, little Madison Wolfe had this to say: “At first she is kind of shy about it. I think that everyone else around her is kind of scared of her, and they shut her out at that time. So she kind of shuts everyone else out and she is feeling really lonely. But then she kind of realizes that they can actually help her and she starts to open up to them. Obviously it got better.”

Likewise, Frances O’Connor commented on the Hodgson family’s initial apprehension towards the Warrens. “Our relationship with Ed and Lorraine is they’re kind of these Americans that have come across – and they are quite glamorous in some ways – how they dress and everything” O’Connor explains. “So for us it’s a little overwhelming that they’re in our house and they’re going to help us. But they’re such lovely people and we instantly feel that they genuinely want to help us. It ends up being a good relationship that we have with them. They help us.”

Even Patrick Wilson made mention of the important familial element in The Conjuring series: “We call it the carburetor scene, me and Ron in the first one, just talking, me fixing his car, and those kind of metaphors that speak about humanity, we have in this, especially when you’re dealing with, we’re leaving our little girl, we’re dealing with a family who is in distress, so that human element, there’s a lot of that, and hopefully a little humor as well.” Wilson went on to say, “I think they’re constantly in that battle of trying to raise their daughter, and yet this is their calling, and how do they remain good parents, and they are towing the line between not just not being there, but really dealing with some pretty emotional, paranormal, if you want to believe in it, but either way, very emotionally disturbing events that are, that can take its toll on the family. So, we definitely pushed that.”

It’s an interesting dynamic set up between the two families, which could possibly capitalize on the idea that was only briefly touched upon in the first film, of the families that the Warrnes visit possibly filling a void for the one they’ve left behind, and vice versa. Ed and Lorraine Warren might act as the pseudo parents for Janet while she’s feeling helpless and alone, and her acting as a pseudo child for the Warrens while they miss their little girl, and solve cases far away across the pond.

Another aspect that was hinted at in the first film and will most definitely be expanded upon in the sequel is the image that’s been haunting Lorraine. “Well I think we get into where that scene in the first one, where you’re wondering where [Lorraine] kind of, what was traumatic to her when she did not want to pursue this anymore, and we push that even further” hints Wilson.

“I think the audience is very curious about what exactly she saw the last time” adds Farmiga, “And we’re going to explore that. We’re going to see her psychic abilities challenged this time around, which will be extremely disconcerting for this dynamic duo because they rely on her. It’s all about what she senses and what she picks up on. So that will be something that they’re challenged by.”

Often times, while filming a movie featuring ghosts or demons or some variation of paranormal activity, rumors start being tossed around of strange happenings and suspicious, unexplained occurrences taking place on the set. The set of The Conjuring 2 is no different. Supposedly, at least according to Warner Bros’ security guard Johnny Matuk, who doubles as a real life ghost hunter, some of the stages that The Conjuring gang are shooting on are notoriously haunted by playful ghosts, who will mess with the living in a variety of ways, including locking the cleaning crew up on the roof of the building, and emitting hammering and drilling noises from places where no one is working at the time.

“They had a priest come bless the set” laughs Frances O’Connor, “Which made me more terrified than kind of relaxed, like, ‘Great!'” When asked how she handled her fear, O’Connor responded, “I actually bought some crystals – protective crystals – and my husband is like, ‘What are you doing?!’ I bought them so I put them on sometimes, just when I’m feeling a little freaked out.”

As for Vera Farmiga, she has a much stricter way of dealing with her superstitions from working on the film. “I have to learn lines in my trailer, during daylight. I don’t take it home with me.” Although there is still some lingering paranoia hanging around Farmiga, she swears it’s lightened up quite a bit in comparison with the first Conjuring. “I was really challenged by the first one, especially in pre-production” remembers Farmiga. “All the research that went into it, it was very difficult for me psychologically. I was very spooked and at all times would look over the kids to make sure they weren’t levitating. Living in fear. My life was drenched in fear, and that’s very different this time around too. Which is a lot more pleasurable. I know how to turn it on for the camera and really just repel any negative thought, any fear, anything [like that] from this perspective and certainly, Lorraine’s Roman Catholic perspective.”

Although it may seem a tad frightening to experience true terror on a set where it should all be make believe, some of the actors, like Frances O’Connor, think having that real fear to fall back on actually helps their performances. “In terms of actually believing in ghosts and stuff?” O’Connor ponders, “Yeah, it’s good for when you have to do the scenes where you’re really terrified, just to access that kind of thing.”

As for Farmiga, she is very spiritual, but not in the same way as some of her co-stars, or even her character. “I believe in negative mysticism and positive mysticism. I have forged my own spiritual narrative in terms of what I believe.” Speculates Farmiga, “I don’t necessarily [think it’s] important for me to sort of give you a dissertation because it’s hard to talk about my concept of god without spending hours deciphering that for you. But yeah, sure. I mean, I think that what’s important [is] for me to buy it hook, line, and sinker because I’m portraying Lorraine and she believes it.”

Some actors fall prey to superstition. Patrick Wilson, on the other hand, doesn’t buy it. His response to strange happenings on set, like a photographer’s camera going awry? “Sounds like he’s got a bad camera.” This proves that there’s no right way to approach a horror movie set, and what a person comes to fear may just be a result of what he or she is open to experiencing.

“The first book I was reading, the one I was given by a demonologist,” remembers Farmiga, “the first thing it says is, ‘Just opening the door, the inquiry into this darkness that you’re about to read is already conjuring it up, making you susceptible.’ ” Farmiga then adds, “It’s very tricky to navigate. I feel that my skin is a little thicker” before laughing and making a point to mention, “It was a heck of a lot easier to have my kids and husband this time around.”

So what’s real? Were spooky, yet playful unseen entities messing with the cast and the crew of The Conjuring crew? Were Peggy Hodgson and her four children really plagued by evil spirits in their home back in the late 1970s? Decide for yourself when The Conjuring 2 hits theaters everywhere on June 10th, 2016.

As for what’s up after the highly anticipated sequel is released, there’s no official confirmation yet, but word around the campfire is that Wan will be making his very own Amityville movie. Whether that turns out to be an additional Conjuring film, thus turning the series into a trilogy like his Insidious franchise, or a spinoff feature more along the lines of Annabelle, remains to be seen, but a nod to the infamous New York haunted house case is likely to be seen in the opening sequence of The Conjuring 2.

Photo credit: Matt Kennedy