Fish and Cherries Productions

Annabelle took the creepiness of The Conjuring and takes it up to eleven. Apart from the jump scares and creepy imagery, this film introduces a huge amount of psychological horror that I don’t think was as prominent in the first film. MILD SPOILER WARNING FOR THE NEXT SENTENCE!! I’m not used to actually seeing the monster in horror films like these, but here it was really effective due to the creepy atmosphere and the demon’s design. SPOILER OVER!! Gone also are the unfortunate implications that were present in The Conjuring (see my Reel Snippet on that for details), which is a huge relief because I thought they were going down a similar route. Thankfully, I was wrong.

However, for every two steps forward, there’s a noticeable step back. The two main characters are the blandest pieces of wonderbread I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. Nothing about them or their lives interested me and the only reason I was invested with them was because they were being haunted. On top of that, the technical aspects of the spirit hunting are gone (again, see me review of The Conjuring) and replaced with the arbitrary skepticism from one of the characters when they simply refuse to believe there’s something supernatural and they just attribute it to the other person being mentally ill or seeking attention and FOR THE LOVE OF CRAP, CAN WE JUST LET THAT HORROR TROPE DIE?! It always comes off like the writers ran out of ideas and needed something to fill in the running time rather than trying to be clever. These two things were pretty serious gripes for me and I was very close to writing this movie off in the beginning, but the terror was so intense that it swept away the majority of my issues. I guess if those faults are harsh deal-breakers for you, you probably won’t enjoy this as much. But I think the horror more than makes up for it.

Seriously, though, who would want to buy a doll that creepy to begin with?