"The Conjuring" is a haunted house film in the vein of "The Amityville Horror." In fact, the mystery of what happened to the Lutz family at their house in Amityville, New York helped bring "The Conjuring" franchise's protagonists, real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), to widespread attention. While that story serves as the prologue for "The Conjuring 2," in the series' first film the focus is the Perrons, a family of seven that moves into a farmhouse in Rhode Island in 1971 only to find themselves confronting increasingly inexplicable events.
This leads them to seek out the Warrens, who step in to figure out what's really going on and how to stop it. "The Conjuring" takes an old-school approach that prioritizes scares over gore. Plus, Ed and Lorraine are fascinating characters whose basic decency in the face of terrible evil makes them easy to invest in.
To some degree the Warrens resemble Floyd DeBeers, the character played by F. Murray Abraham in "Things Heard & Seen." He's a man whose knowledge of spirits yields an eagerness to uncover the identity of the ghost who resides in Catherine Claire's house. Of course, Ed and Lorraine seem to deal exclusively with malevolent forces, while Floyd says most of the ghosts he encounters mean no harm. Nonetheless, "The Conjuring" is yet another movie that explores the way a house's horrible past can take a terrifying toll on those who live there in the present.
