![]() It’s as if script writers Chad and Carey Hayes flipped through Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws or Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine and circled all of what they thought were the most shocking bits, then cobbled together a queer-coded villain from what they found. ![]() It almost feels too obvious to point out the monstrous queer/abject female lines that run through Bathsheba. Rory and two others are all trapped there by a single malevolent entity head moderator Bathsheba Sherman, the queen bitch of the Harrisville home. Soon we find out that Rory is the least of their worries, that the Perrons have logged onto a veritable pHp forum of ghostly presences. April tells her that this isn't an imaginary friend, though-he’s a young boy named Rory that only she can see. She talks to this stranger when left alone, leaving her mother to wonder if she has a new imaginary friend. What grabs my attention is the incredibly over-the-top villain, Bathsheba, and how much she mirrors the villains of my youth, particularly those that adults seemed to think were lurking on the Internet.Īs a young person who was very online during the period of “Internet stranger danger” in the early 2000s, the ghosts that haunt the Perron house appear to me like a cautionary tale of “Meeting Strangers Online.” A strange, unexpected item appears to the youngest daughter, April, like a sinister AOL Online startup disk in the mailbox, through which she makes contact with an unknown person who wants to be her friend. The specters that matter most to me in The Conjuring aren’t necessarily regressive conservative family values, or even those of the real-life Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were likely a far cry from the aggressively kind saviors they’re depicted as in the films. It’s incredibly well-crafted despite the “truncheon-like” script…especially if you’re a fan of bombastic soundtracks, creepy basements, jump scares that actually pay out, and Lili Taylor in general. These criticisms of the film are the same ones I’ve made myself, and yet somehow The Conjuring remains one of my favorite supernatural horror films. The brothers Hayes wield their faith message like a truncheon.” In her essay on The Conjuring in the collection Scared Sacred, Alex West correctly points out the film’s overt pro-Christian agenda* similarly, upon its release Andrew O'Hehir summarized it in his review at Salon with the scathing line, “Nothing new here in terms of horror movies, or borderline Judeo-Christian theology, or generalized male panic.” The Huffington Post’s reviewer declared it dangerous conservative propaganda, saying, “The Conjuring fails utterly to rise above its reactionary politics. However, one thing that reviewers and scholars consistently come back to is the film’s blatantly pro-Christian, pro-family politics. Based on the reportedly true story of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s encounter with the Perron family in 1971 Harrisville, RI, as they dealt with a “malevolent case” of demonic haunting, The Conjuring is a singular entry in 2010s horror, and represents many things to many people.
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