The Conjuring Turned Out Less Brutal Than We Feared, but Still Spooky

We went into The Conjuring dreading it. It came across as a well made movie, and it genuinely wasn't as bad as expected. It wasn't a fun time, and it's likely to linger for a couple of days.

The only reason we did this at all was a promise tied to the Kickstarter for Trending, a 30 minute comedy about two exes who hate each other and have to host a podcast together. When the campaign hit a funding target early, the reward was us sitting through The Conjuring. We said that would never happen. And yet, here we are. We both said up front that we hate all things horror.

Our big complaint with The Conjuring is that nobody just leaves the house

From the opening story about the Annabelle doll, our instinct was simple: the moment something strange happens in your home, you leave. When we heard a seven year old girl had died in the apartment, the answer was a new apartment. When the family dog refused to come inside, that read as the first warning sign, not the clocks.

Other things nagged at us too. A mother screams through the house amid a massive amount of crashing and none of the children wake up. The Warrens keep a room full of cursed objects in their own home. And when the church hesitates because the kids aren't baptized, it was hard to understand why fighting a demon wasn't simply the priest's job.

Sound, light and mystery made The Conjuring bearable

Once the credits rolled, the summary was: "really great like building of tension throughout the use of sound was really effective," along with the way light was used to illuminate the characters. Maybe because it had been built up, it seemed like it was going to be worse. "This was still spooky. Don't get me wrong."

What helped was having each other there and keeping all the lights on, and having a little mystery about how the curse worked seemed to help a little bit with distracting our brains. As for a cinema, the verdict was blunt: "I would never have watched that in a theater. There's no world."

Lili Taylor gave what felt like the strongest performance

The strongest acting seemed to come from the actress playing the mother, Carolyn. Looking her up, we found Lili Taylor, recently the governor in Daredevil: Born Again, with a role in The Haunting. Since she does a lot of horror, maybe she's just really good at it.

Word was that this was the worst one. "If this was the worst one, I don't want to do the rest of them, but I feel like I could." There was still appreciation for it, and it's easy to understand why people call it a good horror movie and also just a good movie. Trending has since hit its 200k base goal, and the campaign is now chasing stretch goals.

Would you leave the house at the first sign of trouble, or stay and call in the Warrens?