The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
Directed by Michael Chaves

I’ve talked about two spin-off movies from The Conjuring Universe, Annabelle Comes Home which was alright, and The Nun, which would have been tough to sit through if I had been sober, but I haven’t talked about any of the main series yet, and there’s a reason for that: I don’t like them. That’s not to say I hate them, I recognize that The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 are slick well-made movies that happen to not appeal to me in any way at all. It’s not that I dislike exorcism or possession movies, I happen to love The Last Exorcism, but there’s just a blandness to The Conjuring series that I can’t stomach. I’m going to try to be fair here, but I wanted to make my starting point clear as to my thoughts on this popular franchise. All that said, let’s talk about The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Remove The Number From My Title!

Spoilers? In My Trailer?

This is a slightly odd movie to summarize because I generally don’t like giving spoilers, but the trailers for this movie spoil key plot points and twists, so anything that happens in those trailers I consider fair game. After an exorcism goes slightly awry, a young man commits murder while under some sort of demonic influence. Our loveable heroes Ed and Lorraine Warren swoop in to convince this man’s attorney that demons and real and make people do murders, but that soon spirals into a completely different plotline. As the Warrens investigate the details of this mystery series of demonic stuff, they uncover something this series has been begging for since day one, a decent villain.

What The Conjuring 3 Does Right.

I’ll be kind and start with what worked for me in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Unlike The Conjurings 1 & 2, there’s great pacing, particularly in the first act, where we learn what’s happening, why it is happening, and why this matters. This momentum does kind of falter as the film goes on, but generally, this narrative is a bit tighter than the others and shaving the runtime down the 1 hour 50 minutes didn’t hurt. They probably could have cut even more out, but that’s neither here nor there, my point is that at the most basic level the plot structure and pacing are here and I was mostly satisfied with them. Also, for the first time, we see a villain that I enjoyed and wanted more of. Sure, this villain isn’t particularly groundbreaking for supernatural horror, but they are well played, and a welcome departure from the pretty lame ghosts and ghoulies that the series has played with previously.

Finally, I Get A Chance To Rant About The Warrens.

Now for the bad, where I’ll start what is, in my humble opinion, the biggest problem of The Conjuring series; Ed and Lorraine Warren. Words can scarcely describe how much I can’t stand these smug, smarmy, holier than thou jerks. They have no characterization. No motivation beyond, I do good things because they’re good, and even while they do good things, the level of judgment they radiate is immeasurable. They are always always always right and that drives me up the wall. Give me a flawed hero! Give me someone with struggles! Give me someone who doesn’t literally believe they have been chosen by God and then present that as being totally accurate! And don’t even get me started on how these movies present skeptics! Apparently, all skeptics are mean cynics who just want to spoil everyone’s fun. What an enlightened perspective.

Oh, Also, This Isn’t The Movie We Advertised.

The story here is all over the place. That big marketing campaign about how this movie is all about THE MOST SHOCKING CASE EVER is slightly, kind of, completely a lie. Maybe 5% of the movie is actually about the court case (To hide the fact that in real life the demonic possession defense was immediately dismissed by the judge.) and the rest of the movie is more of an investigation. That was good news for me because the last thing I want to see is Ed and Lorraine Warren prove the devil is real, and also a dick, to a court that would 100% be full of douchebag skeptics. On the other hand, the investigation we ended up getting wasn’t super interesting, except for when we meet characters far more complex than our protagonists, which honestly makes me believe the movie is just taunting me at this point. There are also a lot of little things that don’t make sense or are brought up and don’t matter, but I can’t even pretend to care about that.

A Guy Who Didn’t Like The First Two Doesn’t Like The Third. What A Shock.

All these The Conjuring movies are slick and well made, but for my taste that kind of makes them worse. I can see there is a lot of skill that goes into these, from the set dressing to the performances of actors playing characters I don’t even like. The fact that this one is a hot mess of contradicting plot points and characters makes me a bit more fond of it, just the fact that there were some ideas here, even if those ideas weren’t well executed or original. Unlike The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2, I wasn’t constantly looking at how the scariest monsters in the world were making doors slowly move. Or they were wreaking havoc while just off-screen a skeptic is staring at a brick wall shouting, “NOPE. NO GHOSTS HERE”. This actually feels like a movie…but still not a very good one. If you want to see a horror movie in a theater, check out A Quiet Place II. If you want to see a good exorcism movie, rent The Last Exorcism. If you want to see a good supernatural investigation movie, watch AngelHeart. All of these movies are better examples of whatever it is The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It tries to be.