Believe it or not, I don't think I've seen any films dealing with the
Conjuring universe until now! But having seen the previews, this sequel to a 2018 spinoff from the original
The Conjuring (2013) looked rather interesting. Actually, at my local theater, there were
two interesting possibilities:
The Nun II or
It Lives Inside. The previews of the latter were also interesting, but it felt like perhaps it was too close to the recent
Talk to Me, which I had already seen and enjoyed. Also,
It Lives Inside was PG-13, and I was feeling in the mood for just a bit more of the
"red red kroovy", so
The Nun II it was!
But first, a word or two about myself (or as Stephen King would describe it,
"an annoying autobiographical pause")...
When I started seriously getting into movies as a young teenager, my first love was the horror genre. I had a lot of interesting books about horror films, including
The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (edited by Phil Hardy), Kim Newman's
Nightmare Movies, John McCarty's
The Modern Horror Film, and Stephen King's landmark non-fiction study
Danse Macabre. But the trouble was, as fascinating and compelling as I found the genre, and as enticing as the horror section of the local Video Vision appeared, my parents were very reticent to let me see any R-rated (never mind
un-rated) horror films unless they had already seen them and felt like I could handle it. So
Alien (1979) and
Psycho (1960) were in, but
The Exorcist (1973) - which gave my stepmother nightmares - was
definitely out. Beyond that, it was such PG or PG-13 fare such as
Poltergeist (1982),
Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983),
Gremlins (1984), etc., etc. (And even then, a PG-13 rating was
still no guarantee. They wouldn't let me see 1984's
Ghoulies because of the satanic ritual sacrifice at the beginning!)
(Mind you, this was the '80s, you Gen-Z boys and girls - and others - out there! I'm guessing very few of you have had the pleasure of viewing a pan-and-scan VHS cassette tape of something which, 50% of the time anyway, was meant to be seen in a wider aspect ratio. But hey, that was the only option we had back then - that is, until widescreen special editions where you were initially confused about the purpose of those black bands on the top and bottom of the screen! Ahhh,
nostalgia...)
Anyhoo... Where was I? Oh yes. Mind you, as unfair as all this might seem, my parents probably had good reason to doubt my fortitude with regard to horrific images. Because believe it or not, at the age of 11, I had actually been terrified by those Terror Dogs from
Ghostbusters (1984) when I first saw it in its first theatrical run. It freaked me out to imagine that Sigourney Weaver's and Rick Moranis's bodies had been taken over by evil spirits formerly incarnated in the form of satanic canines! It was only much later that I actually got into a lot of those harder-edged horror films I had become curious about from looking through the horror section at the Video Vision rental store. Perhaps a bit sooner than my parents would have preferred, but... Well, let's just say thank God for sympathetic relatives, and leave it at that! Anyway, when I finally actually
saw The Exorcist, I found it a very compelling and dramatic film, but
not particularly disturbing. The minions of Gozer the Gozerian had already busted my "possession cherry" quite some time before! Plus I was getting into the likes of Wes Craven's
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and a couple of its sequels, Stuart Gordon's H.P. Lovecraft adaptations
Re-Animator (1985) and
From Beyond (1986), Clive Barker's
Hellraiser (1987) and its sequel
Hellbound (1988), Dario Argento's
Suspiria (1977), Sam Raimi's
Evil Dead I (1981) and
II (1987), David Cronenberg's
The Fly (1986), Ken Russell's
The Lair of the White Worm (1988), Alan Parker's
Angel Heart (1987), and... Well, the end is listless, as they say.
But even then, I had become interested in many other different kinds of films. (Not romantic comedies, mind you. I found the mere idea of those to be
boring.) Many of the other titles I'd gotten into included
Apocalypse Now (1979),
Taxi Driver (1976),
A Clockwork Orange (1971) and
Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982). Even in the aforementioned book
The Modern Horror Film by John McCarty, a couple of the titles he included were Roman Polanski's
Macbeth (1972), Sam Peckinpah's
Straw Dogs and Ken Russell's
The Devils (both 1971), and a couple other titles not necessarily considered horror according to any kind of purist definition, alongside the usual suspects such as
The Exorcist,
Psycho, the Hammer
Dracula (1958),
Alien,
The Shining (1980) and
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). So I definitely made notice of these titles and at some future point I would see them. (BTW, McCarty's book covers the period from 1957 to about 1988, starting with the Hammer
Dracula and
Frankenstein films and ending with Ken Russell's
The Lair of the White Worm. Certainly out of date, by today's standards.)
Anyway, if I had to describe the type of cinema that personally resonated with me, in a nutshell, I would have to say that I was interested in anything which dealt with the darker or more traumatic aspects of the human condition. Anything that has an unsettling, disturbing or cathartic quality, in any way, shape or form. In addition to the aforementioned titles in the last paragraph, that also includes the likes of Sidney Lumet's
Equus (1977), William Friedkin's
Cruising (1980), Liliana Cavani's
The Night Porter (1974), Paul Thomas Anderson's
There Will Be Blood (2007), etc. One of the reasons
why I had gravitated towards horror in the first place was precisely
because it tended towards the confrontational and cathartic, the way classic fairy tales used to. But as I've indicated, it's certainly not the
only genre to enter into such territory. In fact, one could almost argue that the average horror film has become tame and predictable over time, its conventions and tropes subject to blatant self-referencing and cynically ritualistic recycling. Granted, given today's current cultural climate, things which honestly seek to disturb or unsettle have become rare as hen's teeth. Disturbance is certainly not a priority for the corporate merchants who only have their eyes on the bottom line and seek desperately not to offend or even perplex. (Ask yourself why Warner Brothers hasn't yet released the uncut version of Ken Russell's
The Devils in a special edition Blu-ray, or even allowed someone like Criterion, Arrow or Shout! Factory to do the job.)
Which, in a highly roundabout way, brings us (
finally!) to
The Nun II. I'll make this as brief as I possibly can (
"Too late!" I can already hear some of you saying): In this movie, two nuns - Sister Irene from the first
Nun and Sister Debra - attempt to deal with a series of apparently demonic killings in Europe in 1957. They're finally led to a boarding school in Europe, where a character from the first film is working and has gotten close to a young student named Sophie and her mother. A few more killings and jump scares later, we find out that the titular spirit taking the form of a nun is actually searching for the eyes of St. Lucy (
sort of putting us in
Indiana Jones territory). Amusingly enough, we also get an evil horned goat with glowing red eyes, first seen in a stained-glass window but which later emerges in the flesh to terrorize and chase the students of the school! The inevitably overblown climax takes place in the former winery (the school previously having served as a monastery), and let's just say that a miraculous piece of transubstantiation takes place to decisively (?) quench the evil spirit!
As you can gather from the somewhat irreverent tone of my condensed plot description, you can probably tell I wasn't
overly impressed. Granted, I like me a good religious-themed supernatural horror film, but this one doesn't really bring anything new to the table, being rather clichéd and overbaked. Maybe I'm just a cranky old-timer who's seen it all done before and better, but I just felt
The Nun II was all just a bit by the numbers. I guess I could say, on a positive note, that the jump scares were very well-handled. They seemed to be very effective for a good many of my fellow patrons in the theater, anyway! So I guess that's
something...
Speaking of religious-themed horror, I find that I am simultaneously looking forward to
and dreading the arrival of David Gordon Green's
The Exorcist: Believer. The involvement of Ellen Burstyn, returning as Chris MacNeil, has definitely raised my hopes that the movie will be at least decent. Both the trailers I've seen make the film seem somewhat opportunistically cheesy, and give away far too many details of the plot. However, I like the way the first trailer sneaks in the Mike Oldfield
Tubular Bells melody gradually and only a few notes at a time. Very clever. And in the second trailer, we definitely get the impression of playing for very high stakes. Apparently, we'll get a situation in which the lives of two possessed girls will be held in the balance. Who will live and who will die? Stay tuned! (I'm reminded of the horrific and impossible moral choice that the Father Merrin character - played by Stellan Skarsgård - was forced into during the flashback scenes of the
Dominion and
Beginning prequels from 2004.) But my deepest fear is that this is just going to be
Star Wars: The Force Awakens all over again, recycling plot elements from the original and cynically attempting to replicate those things audiences remembered best from the original.
Hopefully, after having seen the impressive
Talk To Me and the somewhat
less than impressive
The Nun II, I haven't already spoiled my appetite for
The Exorcist: Believer. Do you think I ought to sneak in a viewing of
It Lives Inside, or do you think that's enough demonic / possession horror for the time being?
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