Zoetroped

I love when my perseverance in a movie franchise, including preparing by seeing two lousy "Amityville Horror" flicks (1979 and 2005), actually pays off, as it does here with "The Conjuring 2," a sequel that surpasses its promising but largely hackneyed and lackluster predecessor. Now, I realize I may not appreciate the horror genre in the same ways as do others, as a bodily or visceral thrill. I'm not opposed to that, but rarely do I find a horror movie to be scary, which often leads me left with either trying to engage with them intellectually and, as that's often counterproductive to their intent, just seeing them for laughs--the worse schlock sometimes the better. The first "Conjuring" didn't quite succeed on any of those accounts. The horror was too overly rooted in familiar filmmaking and tropes and even combined with relatively poor acting wasn't especially amusing, but it was reflexive. The Warrens aren't only ghostbusters (or demons or whatever); they're filmmakers and exhibitors. They recorded the supposed paranormal activity by camera and sound recording and even employed special lighting techniques. Then, they exhibited these films whether to a priest or a campus of students. In this sequel, they do so for television, as well as their continued collection of documentation for Catholicism. "The Conjuring 2" goes further and improves in other ways on the former picture, too.

There's a lot to like here for one looking for reflexively-engaging cinema. It begins with a séance where Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) enters a past horror, or rather her entering a character in another movie. This is where one is rewarded for watching the aforementioned 1979 and 2005 dullards. Love the mirror motif, too. This somewhat of a film-within-film, however, is interrupted by foreshadowing for the rest of the movie involving the ghastly-looking nun, which will appear later in Lorraine's other nightmarish premonitions--as well as, we're told, her past one which itself is from a film-within-film flashback in the first film--and in her husband's painting, which becomes something of a living portrait. That's approaching "Dorian Gray" levels of cleverness there. Then, there's the TV stuff: the Warrens being interviewed, and the Hodgsons from their haunted home across the pond in London. One of the Hodgson daughters even struggles for control of the TV channel with their ghost squatter.

The Warrens and company are back with the recording equipment, too, so as to verify the supernatural. This ground was already covered in the first movie, but I do appreciate the joke regarding the supposedly-lightweight video camera. Moreover, the abstraction of filmmaking within a film is leveraged more effectively here. Note that the camera and audio tapes are employed to both confirm and deny the paranormal activity. Movies and other recording arts, after all, aren't unbiased arbiters of fact. To use semiotics from film theory, it's just an indexical trace of what was recorded. In other words, film is a ghost. The husband's painting is another instance of this, as is the fevered-dream scratching in the bible by the wife.

This leads me to my favorite part, the zoetrope. Including this "philosophical toy" that played cinema before cinema was supposedly a thing in a movie in the first place is a good way to win me over--the fan of the history of the invention of movies and early cinema that I am--but it's especially wonderful how it's employed here. Zoetrope strips, like their predecessor of phenakistiscope discs, tended to feature drawings instead of photographs (although there were exceptions: the photographic motion pictures of Duboscq, Purkyně, Heyl, Muybridge, Marey, Demenÿ, Anschütz--and bonus points to any reader familiar with all those names). That is, such zoetrope strips as the crooked man here aren't indexical. A cartoon may be based on something in reality, but not even the Warrens would offer it as evidence of demonic possession. What's clever here, then, is that while the video and audio tapes turn out to be unreliable as proof and even if they are good for that they require some editing and interpretation, it's the zoetrope cartoon that manifests as real when the crooked man comes to life--the monster as movie. Anyone taking the based-on-a-true-story nonsense of the movie seriously should consider the lack of earnestness on the part of the filmmakers this implies.

This sequel is an improvement all around, too. The slightly-shaking camerawork works better this time methinks and in a less showy manner. There are still the usual games with telegraphing jump scares, but the whole construction seems less formulaic. The climax is genuinely exciting because it springs from its reflexive elements and was heavily foreshadowed. I also appreciate the depiction of an ideal marriage here more. I like that Farmiga seems to get more attention and not just because I feel as though I've seen Patrick Wilson, who plays her husband, in a lot of other stuff yet still couldn't identify him from a lineup of other leading men who've left little impression on me. The Warrens truly come across as a team in this one. Especially effective is the business of her clairvoyance--seeing what others cannot--and the complimentary analogy later of him losing his physical sight. How apt for a picture of a visual art form reflexively about that art and what is seen and verified.