The Conjuring 2 (2016)

Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson,

Directed By: James Wan

I was so excited when I heard this was coming out, and yet I didn’t actually get a chance to see it til recently.

It’s so rare for a horror to actually be scary, or to have a decent plot and character development, but this series from James Wan about the Warren family is really good. Perhaps this second film isn’t quite as good as the first one, and the Crooked Man has something a little Tim Burton/Nightmare Before Christmas but it’s still one of the best things in horror that I’ve watched this year.

Ed and Lorraine Warren, real life American paranormal investigators, are asked by the Church to look into a haunting in Enfield, London, in which a single mother and her four children find themselves plagued by an evil spirit. But Lorraine is having visions of Ed’s death and a truly terrifying spectre of evil cloaked in the habit of a nun, and they struggle to find identifiable evidence that the haunting is real.

The house that the family live in is truly decrepit (inevitable jokes about the London rental market could be made), and there’s something so sad about the struggling family, whose father has abandoned them. They seem like nice people, and the reason why they are chosen for terror seems all the more terrifying for being almost random. The jump scares are really effective and not over used, the suspense and the mystery as well as the central strong relationship between Ed and Lorraine is the true spine of the film. The big bad in this film… well, it’s pretty nightmarish! Wonderfully creepy.

I’ve seen a lot of crappy, dull horrors this year, and some good ones, but I think this one is my favourite so far, it’s edge of your seat, hide your face behind a pillow stuff. A great ride, and I loved every minute of it.

See It If: you like true story type horror, possession or James Wan. It’s a fun spine tingler.