Most of the terror that The
Conjuring (2013; dir. James Wan) conjures comes from off-stage, so to
speak. Only at the end does the source
of the terror—a demon that has possessed the mother of a family—become clear. To the film’s credit, it inspires a good bit
of suspense and uncertainty. To its
discredit, the revelation that the source of the family’s problems is a demon
simply tosses this film into a pot of other like films where the supernatural
plays a decisive role.
The Silence of the
Lambs (1991; dir. Jonathan Demme) inspired terror through the
psychopathology of Hannibal Lectern, just as Hitchcock’s Psycho did through Norman Bates in 1960). There was nothing supernatural about Hannibal. But his deviance and his personality, his
sense of humor, his relish for good food, made him a truly frightening,
dangerous character.
Is there room for more films about demonic possession. They’re a cliché. And a fiction. I can give myself up to them
occasionally. I remember what it was
like to come home one Sunday evening back in the early 1970s to my room in the
basement of my mother’s house. My
siblings and I had gone to see The Exorcist
(1973; dir. William Friedkin). The
basement was empty, and dark. Every small
sound was reason for insomnia. I managed
to go to sleep with the lights on.
The Exorcist
created its own formulaic cliché. It
ultimately became its own victim. With
good writing and acting and production values, it was truly frightening. Most films that have tried to emulate it have
not come close to succeeding. Even a re-viewing
of The Exorcist proves unsatisfying—rather than something innovative and
new, it seems hackneyed, because of the very clichés it popularized. The
Conjuring doesn’t try to be The
Exorcist, but it does resort to demonology and exorcism, and the
supernatural fiction at its heart—that there is a supernatural realm beyond our own—ruins the frightening
moments it manages to produce.
The appeal of these films is a sign of weak-mindedness in
the people attracted to them, including me, I suppose.
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