Conjuring 3 Isn’t Another Haunted House Movie, Teases Writer

According to writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, The Conjuring 3 won’t be a haunted house movie like the previous two films. Directed by James Wan, the original Conjuring was an enormous sucess and has since given rise to an entire shared universe of spinoffs and sequels. But while the non-mainline films about Annabelle and Valak the demonic nun have taken The Conjuring mythology in brand-new directions, the sequels have continued to draw loose inspiration from the real-life case files of demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. That will once again hold true for The Conjuring 3, aka. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.

Directed by Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona), The Conjuring 3 is based on the real-world trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson in 1981, aka. the “Devil Made Me Do It” case (hence the film’s title). It’s a very different incident from the Perron haunting and Enfield poltergeist cases investigated by the real-life Warrens, which served as the basis for the first and second Conjuring movies. As a result, The Conjuring 3 will be straying from the formula established by the previous installments in the series.

Johnson-McGoldrick, who returned to write The Conjuring 3 after working on The Conjuring 2, confirmed as much in a response to a fan question on Twitter, calling the latest Conjuring sequel a “completely different movie than the first two.” He went on to tease “The franchise is expanding beyond the ‘haunted house’ formula.”

As welcome as this news might be, it doesn’t come as a big surprise. As far back as 2017, producer Peter Safran similarly promised The Conjuring 3 wouldn’t be “another haunted house movie”, regardless of which of the Warrens’ real-world cases it ended up being based on. The fact it revolves around a murder trial – one that, in the film, may or may not involve actual demonic possession – confirms as much and suggests The Devil Made Me Do It could hew closer to something like Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (which is also a courtroom drama with a supernatural horror twist loosely inspired by real events) than its predecessors. In addition, this is the first mainline Conjuring film not directed by Wan, so it may deviate from the previous entries stylistically as much as narratively.

All in all, it’s surely a good thing The Conjuring series is mixing things up. While last year’s Annabelle Comes Home earned decent reviews, the previous two installments (The Curse of La Llorona and The Nun) did not, with critics largely dimissing them both as stylish, but hollow recyclings of jump scares and ideas from the previous entries in the franchise. The Conjuring universe continues to be extremely profitable thanks to the low costs of its films, but it still needs to continue adding fresh twists to its formula if it wants to keep people coming back for more. Fortunately, it sounds like The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It may do exactly that.

Source: David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick/Twitter