I have never been a big fan of The Conjuring movies. They are not absolutely terrible, but they really strike me as being movies that don't have any of the good aspects of being a B-movie. This is funny because they are actually Blockbusters that come out in the theater and generally do really well.
They don't seem to have any of the features of a blockbuster either though. I don't mean that they just don't have big name actors, because I don't care about that. I mean they don't have big scares and they don't have anything in them that would make me go “that's a great movie.”
Not a single Conjuring movie does, but the first one is the best of the lot.
Now the Annabelle series is a little bit different because it doesn't rely on the ridiculous premise about the Ghost Hunter Spirit Tamer people that is based on a true story, even though it is almost entirely not true.
Instead, it is simply a standard scary doll story, and I've always liked those. They started with Chucky, as far as I know, and that movie wasn't particularly scary, but it was still a good place to start.
The Annabelle series is a bit scarier, but generally hasn't been all that scary to me until this one.
The thing that's great about this movie is that they mixed a bunch of different movies together. This is basically a giant mansion that takes in a bunch of orphans who become interested in the doll. It has parents who conjured up a spirit and don't want to believe in the fact that it might be evil. It has priests, it has a well, it has a scarecrow. All of these features come from about a dozen different movies that I can name, and that's a good thing.
You might say something like... well then they are just taking a bunch of ideas from different places without coming up with something new. That's how a lot of things are made, and if they make it work right, then that's fine. This movie is truly a great movie, even though it took things from a lot of different places, and I appreciate that it took things instead of just coming up with something that wasn't good.
If you watch this movie, and you like horror movies, you're probably going to enjoy it.
Thanks for reading.