Warner Bros. recently announced a Superman sequel dated for summer 2027, doubling as a confirmation that so far, their attempt to reboot the DC Universe on film seems to be going well. But as the studio has made the transition from one batch of DC Comics movies to another, it’s easy to overlook that their most consistently successful contemporary cinematic universe – maybe the third-most successful overall, after the behemoths of Marvel and Star Wars – is the Conjuring-verse, whose latest installment, The Conjuring: Last Rites, premiered in theaters this weekend and raked in a monster $83MM at the domestic box office, all while the first three movies climbed the HBO Max streaming charts as viewers got in the mood to scream.
To be sure, the series originated by horror maestro James Wan does not require the same degree of potential homework as the Marvel movies, where two of this year’s three entries featured around a dozen characters first introduced in a variety of other movies and/or TV shows. Even the last cycle of DC movies yielded 16 movies’ worth of sequels, spinoffs, and crossovers. But the same summer that Warner premiered Man of Steel, their previous attempt to make Superman happen on the big screen, The Conjuring became a far less expensive smash, kicking off a decade-plus of stylistically similar hauntings. Last Rites is the fourth Conjuring movie, but the ninth in the series overall – or the tenth if you count The Curse of La Llorona, which features a character from spinoff Annabelle but somehow supposedly isn’t an “official” franchise installment.
The main-line Conjuring movies follow the supposedly reality-based adventures of paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), a married couple who help families rid their homes (and sometimes bodies) of demonic possession or hauntings. The real-life Warrens, who died some years ago, weren’t quite as reputable or universally beloved as the movie versions imply, but then, part of the appeal of the Conjuring films is seeing actors as talented as Wilson and Farmiga playing the clichés of the demonic-possession subgenre with utter sincerity and conviction. Their particular performances might not work as well if they were in service of a movie that regarded the Warrens more skeptically. (Though on the other hand, Farmiga and Wilson would also probably be great as charlatans or hucksters, which the real-life Warrens have been accused of being.) In addition to this quartet of Conjuring pictures, there’s also a trilogy of movies exploring the backstory of Annabelle, the doll the Warrens keep locked in their collection of cursed objects, and a pair of movies about a scary Nun who appears in The Conjuring 2.
These connections can be fun, but they’re inessential – as evidenced by the decanonization of The Curse of La Llorona despite the Annabelle connection and decent box office. All of these movies have been at least moderate hits, and often exceed expectations: The Nun, hardly the best-loved installment in terms of reviews or audience reactions, is nonetheless the biggest of the bunch worldwide. Like superhero movies at their peak, the Conjuring-verse travels well internationally. This is especially impressive considering that when the first movie premiered in 2013, the world already had a James Wan-directed, Patrick Wilson-starring horror franchise! Insidious: Chapter 2 came out just a couple of months later, and those movies have thrived with five installments between 2020 and 2023. But Wan’s second horror series (well, third; he also helped create Saw, amazingly enough) is one of the biggest such franchises of all time.
So what is it about this universe that makes audiences want to revisit it long after most slashers would be played out? The first Conjuring, at least, can be chalked up to pure craft: Wan puts so much effort into just the right camera movements, sound design, and even cheap jump scares that it plays like a more refined version of Insidious’s spookhouse aesthetic. (Worth noting, in fact, that The Conjuring is rated R not for a lot of violence, gore, or sex, but rather just because it’s extremely scary. The filmmakers asked the MPAA what they might cut for their expected PG-13 and apparently got the equivalent of a shruggy emoticon.) It’s so good, in fact, that it’s a wonder the series survived the downturn into tedium repped by Annabelle, its second overall entry and a terrific cure for insomnia. Some of the other films have their moments to be sure – Annabelle: Creation is a fan fave – but only The Conjuring makes a play for classic status. Even then, frankly, indie contemporaries like The Babadook and It Follows are vastly more memorable in the long run, with a scariness that sinks into your bones.
But part of the series’ enduring success may derive from its avoidance of precisely the doomy vibes that those indies give off, and that even creeps into mainstream horror. Some horror fans are probably excited that Neve Campbell is returning for the upcoming seventh Scream, for example, but isn’t also kind of a bummer to watch Sidney Prescott continue to barely escape a masked maniac as everyone around her gets brutally murdered? By contrast, there is something superheroic (if self-aggrandizing) about the way the Warrens themselves aren’t continually stalked or haunted by specific killers. Even in Last Rites, which has them dealing with unfinished demonic business circa the birth of their daughter Judy, their life is depicted as largely happy and functional. When they temporarily retire from investigations, it’s for pretty normal, human reasons: Ed needs to take better care of his health as he ages. For genre fans, horror can serve as a comfort watch, and this series really leans into that. If you like haunted dolls (who don’t actually do very much), exorcism rituals that usually work, or atmospheric period-piece hauntings, there’s probably a Conjuring for that.
More hardcore horror enthusiasts my ask whether horror without lasting trauma, more than occasional kills, or even much psychology is all that scary; for all of the unusual elements of the Conjuring movies, they all amount to pretty familiar exorcism rituals, with the sometime disadvantage of running way longer so we can follow the Warrens in their personal lives before they meet the affected family. It’s almost always a family, and almost always one with a bunch of kids, adding a tacit message that demons are attaching the most holy in their reproductive abundance. It’s weird stuff, especially considering how the sheer number of people in these haunted houses precludes much character development from any of them. (No less an actress than Lili Taylor is in the original Conjuring, and has far more to do in the far-worse 1999 remake of The Haunting.) The later Annabelle sequels are appealing in part because they lack the churchy subtext (and at least the Nun movies are more upfront about it).
But Last Rites did gangbusters business this weekend, and while it leaves the Warrens with such a sentimentally protracted goodbye that another direct sequel would feel untoward, it also wouldn’t be shocking if they return again anyway. (If the Warrens don’t come back in full capacity, perhaps they’ll be glimpsed as their surrogate daughter Annabelle, who appears briefly here, returns to the fold.) That would be a classic cheesy horror move, yet that’s one more element of this universe’s appeal: It doesn’t particularly require the increasingly convoluted resurrections or flashbacks that other long-running horror series must go through in order to revive Freddy or Jigsaw or whoever else. If the demons are largely interchangeable, there’s also an endless supply, and a solemn belief that fighting them off might just be all in a day’s work.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.