This article contains spoilers.

All of the films in the blockbuster Conjuring franchise so far have, in the periphery, also served to set up a future spin-off about other demonic creatures. The new release Annabelle Comes Home, written and directed by Gary Dauberman, is no exception. In fact, it has more new demons and nightmares than ever!

In the film, all of the cursed artifacts from the Warren household are unleashed at once, courtesy of the malevolent Annabelle doll. There are so many that they don’t all get a lot of screentime, and some have more fleshed out backstories than others within the film proper.

Bloody-Disgusting got Dauberman to reveal more about these new demons and haunted artifacts than you’ll learn in the film, and talk about the possibility for these nasty specters to show up and possibly headline their own Conjuring films in the future!

THE HELLHOUND

In Annabelle Comes Home, Bob (Michael Cimino) gets stuck outside the house, in the fog, and fights for his life against a creature that looks like a ghostly werewolf. As strange as that is, Dauberman explains, it’s not a new creation for the movie!

“You know that’s an actual case of the Warrens, right? They actually investigated this man who was seemingly possessed by the spirit of a werewolf, or in this movie I call it the Hellhound at first,” Dauberman says. “It’s not a werewolf until it actually is a man turning into a wolf.”

“But I like the idea of this Hellhound possessing the spirit of this person, and I was looking at places where the Warrens investigated things and this man actually was, I believe he was around Essex. I was doing a little research there and there is this ghost, this Hellhound that appears on a bed of fog and haunts the coastline,” Dauberman adds. “And I thought that was a really cool story element that I embraced when thinking about this Hellhound/werewolf.”

There’s one big difference between the Hellhound and a traditional movie werewolf. You can’t destroy the Hellhound. Silver bullets would be useless because he’s already a specter, who only transforms people into wolves by possessing them.

“You don’t kill it!” Dauberman clarifies. “Look, he’s in the artifact room for a reason.”

“I guess you can only exorcise the spirit from the person he possesses, but the ghost werewolf I think lives on,” Dauberman says.

It sounds like it’s a good idea for a Conjuring spin-off. Surely we won’t have to wait long for a Hellhound movie, right?

“I hope not, man!” Dauberman laughs. “I love werewolf movies. I love the lore of lycanthropy and stuff, and really what was the last, I mean honestly, you would know, what was the last good one?”

When Bloody-Disgusting responded with Adrián García Bogliano’s Late Phases, Dauberman laughed and said, “Holy shit, fantastic. Alright, I’m going to watch that this weekend, actually.”

Regardless, Dauberman reminds us, “There aren’t a lot of good ones, right? So to me, I hope people want to see it because I would love to fucking work on it.”

Does that mean he’d direct Hellhound himself?

“I don’t know, I guess I would have to see the script!,” Dauberman laughs. “But I had a lot of fun working on that part of the story. It just felt unusual and unique, and you want [to] build it in and make it feel a part of the universe. It was something we hadn’t seen before so I thought it was a lot fun.”

THE BRIDE

Another of the interesting new demons in Annabelle Comes Home is The Bride, a haunted bridal gown that possesses people and turns them into monsters. It’s a very distinctive look, not entirely dissimilar from the appearance of the title character in the recent Conjuring spin-off, The Curse of La Llorona.

When asked if the similarities were a coincidence or a concern, Gary Dauberman says “I think it’s more of a coincidence than a concern.”

“Yeah, because La Llorona, she’s wearing the white wedding dress that she killed her kids in. But I just like the idea of this haunted…

“I love this striking image of a woman in a wedding dress with a veil, covered and splattered in blood at the end of a hallway,” Dauberman continues.

As for the origin of The Bride, it’s actually rooted in anxieties that would be familiar to anybody who’s gotten married.

“I thought about the backstory of… it sounds so silly, but how stressful weddings are and things like that,” Dauberman explains. “And also, to me, I have a really cool backstory that’s kind of like a psychological horror movie, a backstory attached to that dress.”

THE FERRYMAN

A demon who gets a particularly large amount of screen time in Annabelle Comes Home is The Ferryman, a creature who seems to collect dead bodies with coins over their eyes. It’s a premise that stems from real-life cultural traditions, in which the coins were supposed to be used to pay Charon, the Ferryman, to carry the souls to the land of the dead.

But don’t be fooled: The Ferryman isn’t literally Charon, Dauberman says.

“I have a different backstory for him but yeah, I drew upon that Greek mythology for sure, because I just always thought it was so creepy,” Dauberman continues. “And I just I thought how could we give a new spin on it. But I don’t think there needs to be only one, if that makes sense.”

Does Dauberman mean there are multiple Ferryman? “I think there could be, yeah.”

The details of how The Ferryman operates are hinted at in the film, but it looked to Bloody-Disgusting like The Ferryman is collecting souls with coins over their eyes, making them part of his horde.

“That’s not so far off the mark of what I was thinking,” Dauberman says. “But you know, the tape that Mary Ellen’s listening to as [she’s] interviewing that little girl [in Annabelle Comes Home] has a little bit of the backstory in there.

“But these are things you kind of just want to tease out and hopefully if people seem to dig it we can explore it in future movies,” Dauberman says. “And if not we can just leave it at that and it’s just for other people to come up with as backstories and go maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that.”

THE HAUNTED TELEVISION

Not all of the artifacts in the Warren’s artifact room are haunted by vicious spirits. Some of the antiques seem to have unique properties all their own, like an old television set that shows images out of sequence with actual time. It seemed, to Bloody-Disgusting, like the sort of evil antique that you might find in an episode of Friday the 13th: The Series.

And it’s a device that Dauberman has also thought about, but he included in the film for a very practical reason.

“The TV, I have an idea for,” Dauberman says. “But I just like the idea that it’s just a different type of scare.”

“I wanted something, you said Friday the 13th, I wanted something [with] a little Twilight Zone-y vibe to it, and I love the look of those old televisions,” Dauberman explains. “So I just thought it would be a unique opportunity to something with maybe a little bit of a sci-fi component to it, that doesn’t feel like it’s just, ‘Oh, there’s an entity also attached to this thing,’ you know what I mean?”

“That was important to me, to try to think of other, different types of scares that aren’t just ‘Oh, this is also a different spirit,’” Dauberman adds.

The haunted television is also evocative of early horror stories about our cultural anxieties about television technology, like Arch Oboler’s 1953 film The Twonky. Would a film about the television set be about those techno-fears?

“That’s something I think you could play around with for sure in the movie,” Dauberman muses, as he leaves the door open for other possibilities.

“You know, when I think of these things I kind of write about, I think it was half a page of what I think it could possibly be,” he adds. “But also I don’t like to be so specific where suddenly I’m painting myself into a corner and I’m not free to think of other things, or somebody else [isn’t free] to think up other stuff, you know?”

THE HAUNTED TYPEWRITER

Then again, even in a movie like Annabelle Comes Home, sometimes a haunted typewriter is just a haunted typewriter.

“The typewriter, I just thought – this is going to sound so basic – but really, I just loved the idea of the clack-clack-clack,” Dauberman explains. “And then you look at it and it says ‘Miss Me?’”

“I don’t know what the story is there yet, for instance, I just like it for that kind of moment,” he concludes.

You’ll find all these demons and more in Annabelle Comes Home, and – if history is any indication – in future Conjuring installments to come!