Who would have guessed that a more satisfying cinematic universe would be built off of The Conjuring than the Universal monsters? Annabelle: Creation, which is being marketed as the next chapter in the “Conjuring universe,” opens in theaters on August 11th, and it’s receiving excellent reviews thus far. This comes a year after The Conjuring 2 met the high bar set by James Wan’s 2013 hit, even surpassing it in some ways; two spinoffs, The Nun and The Crooked Man, are also on the way. The narrative surrounding Annabelle: Creation is that it blows Annabelle out of the water, and while that may be true, John R. Leonetti’s hard work on the first film should not be disregarded. Annabelle has plenty of issues to be sure, but Leonetti manages to pepper a relatively mediocre horror movie with a number of truly inventive scares that deserve recognition, and a handful of interesting ideas on display make Annabelle worthy of a second look.
For a movie based on one scene from The Conjuring, Annabelle does a decent job of feeling like it takes place in the same world as James Wan’s instant classic, though there are only a few direct connections. It opens with the exact same sequence that kicked off The Conjuring, in which three young adults speak to Ed and Lorraine Warren about their experience being terrorized by an evil doll. In Annabelle, though, there’s a new line added in: one of the women notes that she received the doll as a gift from her mom and doesn’t know where it came from, which sets up an epilogue where Annabelle is purchased by that girl’s mother. Clearly, nobody involved with the first Conjuring anticipated an Annabelle-centric spinoff, and so this line is quietly inserted in order to retroactively set up a standalone outing. Leonetti is just sort of hoping you don’t remember that this connection was not originally present.
As another tie-in, Leah’s cot mobile in Annabelle makes a very similar jingle as the music box from the original Conjuring. That’s never explained, but this tune apparently pops up everywhere in the Conjuring universe like the numbers from Lost, providing otherwise unrelated stories with a common thread. The opening of The Conjuring also relied heavily on Annabelle drawing with a red crayon, and this is carried over into the spinoff. Essentially, Leonetti squeezes the four minute cold open of The Conjuring for all it was worth and used every part of it imaginable.
At the same time, there are some inconsistencies. The Conjuring implies that Annabelle Higgins was a seven-year-old girl who died in an apartment, but in Annabelle, she is an adult woman who dies in a house. Maybe these are two different people who happen to share the name Annabelle Higgins and who happened to have died near the Annabelle doll in separate incidents? Also, in The Conjuring, the opening scene is identified as taking place in 1968. Annabelle is set one year earlier according to a title card that appears at the beginning, yet the year is now 1970, as indicated by a newspaper shown in one montage sequence. This is all to say that Annabelle certainly could have connected to The Conjuring in a way that blew our minds and felt like it was planned all along, but that does not happen here.
It shouldn’t blow any minds to say that Annabelle is inspired by Rosemary’s Baby, even more so than it is inspired by The Conjuring. Both movies are about a young woman who moves into an apartment building with seemingly peculiar neighbors and who is fraught with anxiety about her new child. Both characters are subsequently haunted by demonic imagery, and the film ends with this woman having to make a key decision about her baby’s future. Rosemary’s Baby’s iconic finale is centered around a black carriage, and an almost identical black carriage is seen during the basement scene in Annabelle. And just in case you missed the point, the protagonists of Annabelle are named Mia and John, a reference to Rosemary’s Baby leads Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes.
Leonetti pays tribute to several other horror films of the 1960s and 1970s as well, including The Exorcist; Annabelle’s opening title card is awfully reminiscent of the title card of The Exorcist, and like William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, Annabelle opens with a statue of a demon. There’s a fine line between tipping one’s hat to what came before and simply being derivative, and Leonetti verges into the latter camp just a bit too often. Still, he does wind up throwing in some unexpected twists on the formula in the final act, including a complete reversal on Rosemary’s Baby. We’re led to believe the demon is interested in Mia’s baby, Leah, but it actually only cares about Mia herself, something that can not be said of Rosemary’s Baby. In this way, all the Polanski homages are actually something of a red herring.
As a film set in 1970, Annabelle reflects the tumult associated with this time in history, when Americans were coming off of a decade in which there was the assassination of a president and a civil rights icon, the height of an extraordinarily unpopular war, and the rise of cults like The Manson Family. This informs Annabelle’s opening act, in which Mia reminds her husband that they need to lock their doors now because they’re living in a different world. They feel this way even before everything begins to go south, reflecting the idea that Americans in 1970 felt like they were living a horror movie. The film’s plot of a cult called The Family invading a pregnant women’s home and stabbing her is also inspired by the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. None of this is exactly subtle, but it’s something that takes Annabelle a step beyond typically lazy genre fare devoid of anything compelling to say.
If you go into Annabelle amped up to see a killer doll movie, you’re going to be let down. Contrary to what the marketing led some to believe, Child’s Play this is not. Annabelle is nothing more than a conduit for the actual villain of the movie; the demon might as well have focused its evil energy around a shoe rather than a creepy doll. To be fair, The Conjuring did establish that Annabelle is not possessed, but Leonetti still constantly plays with our expectation that she will begin moving on her own at any moment, with dozens of shots lingering on her for just a bit too long as we wait for something to happen like in a Paranormal Activity film. That’s even the final beat of the movie: the camera holds on Annabelle for a full 15 seconds as we hang on for more, but Leonetti instead cuts to black. Some will find this restrained and effective, while others will find it cheap and disappointing.
Mia and John are likable enough in Annabelle, although they don’t even come remotely close to recapturing the magical chemistry of Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in the main Conjuring series. But the movie’s most fatal flaw comes down to the fact that there are at least three separate characters who serve no purpose other than to spout exposition. The first is Father Perez, who delivers a homily that conveniently happens to share the same theme as the film. He is later attacked by Annabelle just so the movie can get some cheap scares, and that’s it for him. Still, another is Detective Clarkin, who shows up a few times to deliver information to Mia and hint that she may be suffering from postpartum depression but who never does anything else.
And finally, there’s Evelyn, a character awkwardly shoehorned into the plot more than halfway through whose only function is to sacrifice herself in order to save Mia. In a better movie, Evelyn would be woven into the fabric of the story and would be someone for whom we care and whose sacrifice is a gut punch. But here, she is nothing more than a plot device. Evelyn’s decision also strips Mia of a lot of her agency in the last act. The movie seems to want to have its cake and eat it too, getting Mia to the place where she’s willing to die for Leah but instead offering up a much less memorable character as the sacrificial lamb.
So some of these plot points and character beats in Annabelle are not as strong as they could be, and for that reason, most people dismiss this movie. But those who do are missing out on some speculator horror sequences that while not quite measuring up to the genius of James Wan still come pretty darn close.
That gets started only about 10 minutes in when the audience witnesses the neighbors being slaughtered, but neither Mia nor John quite realizes the danger of the situation. Mia steps outside and observes the quaint suburban neighborhood as the viewer, knowing far more than she does, screams at Mia to protect herself and the baby. Mia soon makes a phone call and only the audience sees a woman walking behind her; this isn’t even a jump scare, but it has the same effect on us. Chills run down our spine as Mia, who is gathering herself in her room thinking she’s alone, hears a voice whisper, “I like your dolls.” A man approaches Mia from behind – we once again see him before she does – and the stabbing occurs. This whole sequence is a total rollercoaster ride with Annabelle Higgins’ whisper serving as the final drop, and it’s one of the finest uses of dramatic irony in recent horror history.
Leonetti utilizes dramatic irony a few more times, including during a scene in which Mia falls asleep looking after Leah and Annabelle Higgins is seen walking by in the background. This time, there’s absolutely no music or sound effects at all. Fitting with this M.O. of letting us notice things before Mia does but not having the film point them out explicitly, there’s a great sequence in which Mia walks over to turn off a record, only for the camera to pan left and reveal a woman standing behind the curtain. For a beat, the movie makes no reference to the fact that anything is wrong and letting us discover the woman for ourselves elicits a stronger reaction from us than aggressively pointing her out with a zoom or a burst of music. Not long after, a similar scene occurs, with Mia walking over to turn off the sewing machine and the camera casually revealing a young girl standing behind her. The film is agonistic about whether this is scary; Leonetti just places this in the frame and lets it speak for itself.
That sewing machine, by the way, is the film’s ultimate Chekhov’s Gun, which finally comes into play during a dramatic fire sequence. While Mia continues sowing and remains oblivious to the house beginning to burn down, Leonetti continues cutting to an absolutely excruciating number of close-ups as Mia’s finger inches closer and closer to the blade and the audience continues to cringe anticipating something that she does not see coming. Finally, Mia does cut her finger, but the payoff is almost a relief after the state of suspense Leonetti kept us in for those few minutes.
Then, of course, there’s the basement sequence, one of those instances in film history of a scene that singlehandedly makes an otherwise only okay movie worth an enthusiastic recommendation. In yet another example of dramatic irony, as Mia is putting some boxes into storage, the audience notices a stroller rolling into frame behind her. She walks over to investigate when a baby is heard crying, and Mia slowly reaches her hand into the carriage. We anticipate something horrifying, but the carriage was just a distraction; the horrifying image actually comes from Mia’s left, a solid use of filmmaking misdirection. Mia runs from a dimly-lit demon into the elevator, but in a gag that feels straight out of The Twilight Zone (or, more recently, Grave Encounters 2), the elevator continues to drop her off on the same floor no matter what level she selects. Leonetti hammers home the notion that evil is overwhelming, inescapable, and unfair.
Mia then has no choice but to run through the room to make it to an exit, and Leonetti taps into the primal fear we have as children hurriedly running up the stairs of a dark basement after turning off the lights and feeling like something is chasing you. Of course, you would never turn around and look to find out whether your fears are unfounded. When Mia turns around, the demon remains perched on the stairs and ready to strike, precisely the image we all had in our heads as kids. Like so many classic horror films, Leonetti has taken a primal fear and put it up on screen with this unforgettable horror setpiece. If the rest of the movie was that imaginative, we would have an all-time classic on our hands.
As is, Annabelle is sort of a mixed bag of a movie, though it’s certainly better than its reputation suggests. The plot is a bit derivative, with Leonetti borrowing heavily from Rosemary’s Baby in pretty overt ways. The side characters could also use some work, most notably Evelyn, who doesn’t show up until the last half and exists just to die in place of Mia. But Leonetti still brings some worthwhile concepts to the table by playing off of real anxieties in American history, and his ability to construct so many effective horror gags makes him someone whose career is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
