TALKING STRANGE
THE CONJURING IMPACT How the 2013 mega-hit continues to haunt pop culture.
IT WAS THE MORNING OF JULY 11, 2013, when members of the media settled in at the Warner Bros. screening room in Manhattan to watch The Conjuring eight days before its theatrical release in the United States. In just under its two-hour runtime, other journalists and I squirmed in our seats, cried out, and noted this haunted AARON SAGERS house story involving a frightened family, a cursed New PARANORMAL England farmhouse, and husband-and-wife paranormal POP CULTURE investigator team Ed and Lorraine Warren. EXPERT The film was different and would go on to define a decade of horror. Drawing on supernatural elements from The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, and director James Wan’s own Insidious, The Conjuring hit big with audiences. Real big. With a $20 million budget, the film ultimately grossed $319 million at the box office globally. And a decade after its release, it has a legacy that has impacted paranormal pop culture in three big ways.
JAMES WAN
Prior to The Conjuring, James Wan enjoyed success with the exceptionally profitable Saw franchise, having directed the first installment in 2004 and executive-produced eight sequels. But Wan feared being pegged as a creator of primarily gory fare and independently made 2010’s PG-13 horror Insidious, which starred The Conjuring’s Patrick Wilson. Following the massive hit of The Conjuring, Wan would go on to direct the seventh Fast & Furious film and Aquaman, while also directing another Conjuring film and producing 17 features, including last year’s M3GAN. Wan returns as director for 2023’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, for which he also receives story credit and produces.
ED AND LORRAINE WARREN
The self-identified demonologist/ medium duo are arguably the most famous paranormal investigators of all time, but their spotlight burned brightest during the late 1970s with their involvement in the Amityville Horror haunting. Ed died in 2006, and Lorraine occasionally appeared in the paranormal reality TV series Paranormal State, which ran from 2007–2011. Although the pair remained well known in spooky circles, it was The Conjuring that brought them more into the mainstream than ever before with these loosely “based on a true story” adaptations (despite criticism of their methodology or the extent to which they were involved in some cases).
Other Warren investigations—such as the haunted Raggedy Ann doll named Annabelle or the Arne Cheyenne Jackson “Devil Made Me Do It” trial— were likewise adapted to films. Lorraine served as a consultant on The Conjuring in 2013, where she was played by Vera Farmiga, and died in 2019. In 2022, Netflix’s first paranormal investigative series, 28 Days Haunted (hosted by yours truly), was based on theories attributed to the Warrens.
THE CONJURING UNIVERSE
In the first film, Patrick Wilson, playing Ed Warren, takes a reporter on a tour of his collection of haunted objects, stating that every item is “either haunted, cursed, or has been used in some kind of ritualistic practice.” The scene might as well have been the paranormal equivalent of Nick Fury teasing “The Avengers Initiative” at the end of the first Iron Man movie. Indeed, following the success of the 2013 film, “The Conjuring Universe” was spawned. Wilson and Farmiga returned as the Warrens in two direct sequels—2016’s The Conjuring 2 and
THE CONJURING UNIVERSE IS THE HIGHEST-GROSSING HORROR FRANCHISE OF ALL TIME. 2021’s The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It—with a third in development titled The Conjuring: Last Rites. Similarly, there have been five spinoff films, including three focused around the evil doll Annabelle, The Curse of La Llorona, as well as The Nun and its September 2023 sequel, The Nun 2. To date, The Conjuring Universe is the highest-grossing horror franchise of all time and has made more than $2 billion, eclipsing Wan’s own Saw franchise by more than a billion bucks. Annabelle even crossed over into the DC Extended Universe by making cameos in Aquaman and both Shazam! films. DEN OF GEEK
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