Editorials
Why ‘The Conjuring 2’ Made Me Cry
This month has been awful, and I mean awful. Two weeks ago I lost both of my jobs (in one day through, no fault of my own, and was given no explanation). Then, last week, as I was driving to an interview, I was basically run off the road, which left my car un-drivable. These things, coupled with the fact that I’m getting married in September, have really thrown me for a loop. In the 10+ years I’ve been working I’d never been fired before, and certainly not twice in one day. My ego is bruised, my stress levels are through the roof, and I haven’t written anything in a while. It sucks.
After a long couple weeks of lying around my apartment and filling out numerous applications and assessments, I had to get out and be a part of the world again, even if I didn’t want to. A friend and I went to see James Wan’s highly anticipated sequel, The Conjuring 2, and while I was expecting to enjoy it, I was not expecting to find love, happiness, and solace in it.
Admittedly, there’s not much that James Wan has done in horror that I haven’t enjoyed to some extent but his work chronicling the cases of Ed and Lorraine Warren have been his best. They’re scary with just enough humor sprinkled throughout to temporarily alleviate the exquisite dread that is built in each film. In short, I loved it. While I didn’t think it was as scary as the first, I found it to be a deeply immersive film with incredible set design, direction, and performances.
This isn’t a review or even an op-ed, I guess. It’s more of a letter or musing on Wan’s (and the writers’) ability to take characters, both fictional and real, and make the audience care about them. Further, it’s also about how horror can really help you remember what you’re most thankful for.
Ed and Lorraine Warren investigated countless cases and whether you believe they were actually fighting off supernatural evil or not doesn’t matter. What does matter is how these two are portrayed. Twice in the film, a story is told by both characters who’re brilliantly performed by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. They are speaking to a girl who is being tormented by demonic spirits and has lost all of her friends because of it; it’s a tale is about finding the one person who believed them out of all the naysayers they had encountered over the years. It ends like this (spoiler):
“…You know what I did next?”
“What?”
“I married him…”
…or her, depending on who’s telling the story. At that point, while I sat in a dark theater, I felt my throat tighten and my eyes beginning to well up. “Am I going to cry during The Conjuring 2?,” I thought. I fought the tears and soon the next supernatural episode came and I was back to normal. But later on, during a scene in which Ed sings Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling In Love” (to bring a bit of happiness to a terrified family), I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Patrick Wilson looked at Vera Farmiga in such a comforting and loving way that it made me entirely lose it. I sat and let the tears silently stream down my face because James Wan, Patrick Wilson, and Vera Farmiga reminded me how lucky I am to have my fiance, especially during these times.
The Conjuring 2 isn’t just about scaring us or bringing back the feeling of the great ghost films of decades past; it’s about showing the audience that bad things happen to good people, but they can also be fought off by the good as well…and that having at least one person who can be there for you, even at your very worst, is one of the best things that life can offer.
Did going to the movies make all my problems go away? No. Did it get me a job or fix my car? No. But for two hours, at the end of a really terrible couple of weeks, it reminded me that I am loved and lucky to have someone who believes me. And you know what I’ll do next?
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
You must be logged in to post a comment.