Annabelle: Creation (2017)
Directed by David F. Sandberg
Several years after the tragic death of their little girl, a doll maker and his wife welcome a nun and several girls from a shuttered orphanage into their home, soon becoming the target of the doll maker's possessed creation—Annabelle.
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4 films that influenced Annabelle: Creation
What critics say influenced Annabelle: Creation
Annabelle: Creation is an origin story for The Conjuring franchise.
With franchise mania creeping across genres into James Wan’s The Conjuring universe, we were subjected to a mediocre first spin off with Annabelle (2014).
An idiotic, incoherent, cynical cash-in that treated horror fans like fools, it was clearly a lazy and hurried money spinner after the success of James Wan's The Conjuring .
Annabelle was first introduced in The Conjuring, directed by Wan and based in the real-life lore of ghostbusters and demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren.
And for those of you who are curious, Creation does tie into the original Annabelle and we also get nods to The Conjuring as well as the real-life haunted doll, too.
Lights Out proved that Sandberg loves the horror genre so it didn’t surprise me when Warner Brothers announced that he would direct Annabelle: Creation, the next film in what can now be described as The Conjuring Cinematic Universe.
The list includes two Conjuring and three Insidious films, plus the Conjuring spinoff Annabelle – which now has a prequel co-produced by Wan and directed by Sweden's David F. Sandberg, who made his Hollywood debut with last year's moderately stylish Lights Out .
Sandberg unabashedly wears his influences on his sleeve, and tucked inside are very obvious references to Wan’s “Insidious,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and, perhaps most surprisingly, 1973’s “Messiah of Evil.”
Whatever it is, it’s on the way to being a lynchpin of one of the most successful horror franchises ever, a nearly $900 million part of director-producer James Wan’s creepshow empire, which includes Saw (six movies and counting), Insidious and now the ever-widening world of Annabelle.
There is a sense of déjà vu with many of the overall looks of the film, including the demon’s design (very Insidious -like) as well as the old 1950s house.
While its sequels indulged in comparable squalor, Wan’s heart was really in a quainter, comparatively gore-free form of horror, which expressed itself in the quite amusing ventriloquist-dummy freak-out Dead Silence (2007) (source of probably the funniest, sickest EC Comics–style twist ending in years) and blossomed in Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013), scare machines that harked back to Amityville -style high jinks.
As for Annabelle herself, Sandberg seems to have taken a cue from The Conjuring and Insidious, especially when it comes to shot composition and the score, and it winds up serving the title villain very well.
But Sandberg knows how to ratchet up suspense, composing shots filled with beautiful shadows, in whose corners there always seems to be lurking something scary: a ghostly little girl; a doll that looks like the spawn of Howdy Doody and Bette Davis in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”; and something far more sinister.
It's not as good as The Conjuring , nor as good as The Conjuring 2 - a very definite familiarity has started to creep in concerning how plots in this shared universe are to be structured, and particularly to the rhythm by which they dole out their scares - but it's as satisfying as any horror film I've seen in 2017 (not a particularly impressive achievement, to be fair), and so much vastly superior to Annabelle that it hardly seems possible that they're in the same franchise.
I’m not sure how I feel about this idea to create an entire cinematic universe out of the monsters, demons and ghosts introduced in both The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 , Sandberg’s film forced to work a little overtime in order to drop in hints for upcoming spin-offs featuring ghoulish creatures first seen in those two hit horror films.
It has echoes of the original film, and works more with mood and less with cheap scares than either “Annabelle” or “ The Conjuring 2 ,” resulting in a truly effective genre flick.
Among horror franchises, “The Conjuring” and “The Conjuring 2” are among the smartest, and scariest, titles on the shelf — while their spinoff siblings, the idiotic “Annabelle” and the new and slightly sharper “Annabelle: Creation,” have labored to catch up.
It’s a choice that immediately distinguishes the movie from “Annabelle,” with its middle-class L.A. milieu, and establishes a sense of continuity with “The Conjuring” and “The Conjuring 2,” both of which told stories subtly rooted in economic despair, about young women in ramshackle homes that quickly came to feel like prisons.
Earning its shared-universe keep, the film finds a way not just to tie itself back to the two movies that spawned it, but also to plant a small seed for one of two other spin-offs on the way by randomly alluding to that spectral nun from The Conjuring 2 .