‘The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It’ Opens with Intense, Failed Exorcism [Sneak Peek]

James Wan has passed the baton to Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) for The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, coming to theaters and HBO Max on June 4, 2021. The third entry in the popular franchise is being described as the darkest one yet and a departure from the previous two films. To get a feel for what’s in store, Bloody Disgusting got to check out the first eleven minutes of the movie and chat with Chaves about the footage. Between the intense opener, which feels more like a climactic scene, and the case that inspired the film, The Devil Made Me Do It looks to shake up the franchise’s conventional haunted house format.

Gone is the familiarity of the traditional openers established by The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2. Instead of opening sequence investigation cases removed from the central plot, which previously introduced Annabelle and teased the Amityville house, The Devil Made Me Do It picks up deep amid a possession case, with a trashed home and claw marks etched along the walls. Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), along with their assistant Drew (Shannon Kook), are deep in the throes of battling a powerful entity that’s inhabited young eight-year-old David Glatzel (The Haunting of Hill House’s Julian Hilliard). They’ve called in reinforcements from the church, but preventing the possessed child from causing harm until they arrive proves daunting.

This opening establishes a few key scares. David breaks free from his family and the Warrens, running upstairs to hide in the rural home. It shows the entity tormenting him, leading to a startling scare in the bathtub, followed by the child getting showered in blood. After David stabs his father in the leg, the Warrens realize they can’t wait and begin. The possessed throws every trick he can, including contorting his body in unnatural ways, while Lorraine gets slammed with horrifying visions. This extreme scene results in a failure; Arne Jackson (Ruairi O’Connor), fiancé to David’s sister, doesn’t heed Ed’s warnings. He invites the demon into himself.

Of this opening sequence, Chaves explains, “Everybody, starting with James Wan all the way down to the studio, wanted to kick the doors off the haunted house. We’ve seen the Warrens exorcise demons a couple of times; everyone expects that’s how we’re going to end the movie. What happens if you open a movie like that? When they fail?”

While the first eleven minutes packs in the atmosphere, scares, some character dynamics, and an inciting event that will have ripple effects throughout the film, it’s the body-bending of David that stands out. Chaves, doing as much on camera as possible, credits Hilliard’s body double for this unnerving moment.

“We had this amazing double, a contortionist named Emerald [Gordon]. She was twelve years old at the time of filming, and I think Julian was eight. All those contortionist scenes are all on camera. There are no speed effects either. What we had rehearsed is that she’d do it very slowly. We thought it’d be creepy to do this slow rise, but after we did it a couple of times, I asked if she could do anything else. She said she could do a really fast version. So, she did that, and you could hear everyone on set about to lose their lunch. She literally gets up that quickly. It’s all real-time. The visual effect is that we added Julian’s face onto her.”

In keeping with the theme of this sequel as taking an unexpected approach, Chaves warns not to hope for an introduction to a new spinoff entity. “When James first talked to me about this, the first thing I asked is what’s the new iconic monster. I was so excited; James is the master monster maker. From the very beginning, though, he said, ‘That’s what everyone’s expecting. We’re going to do something different.’”

Chaves also stresses that it’s not just the horror element that makes this entry the darkest yet, “I think there’s always going to be the marketing spin that this is the darkest Conjuring movie yet, but in a lot of ways, this really is the darkest Conjuring movie yet. There’s a real victim. There’s a real man who was killed, and we’re telling a story of the murderer. It’s Arne’s story. Debbie Glatzel, the sister of David, was there. She witnessed the murder, and she testified that she was possessed. She stood by him this entire time. They remained married up until just a week ago; she passed away from cancer. But they were married their entire lives. We interviewed them, and they stuck to their story. It was one of the darkest points in their life.”

In addition to the true-crime procedural aspect of the story, the director leaves us with a cryptic tease for what Ed and Lorraine Warren will face this outing, “I think this is a movie that’s intentionally a different Warren movie, and a different experience. We definitely have an adversary that we’ve never faced before. I think that in itself is going to be unique and surprising.”

(L-r) PATRICK WILSON, Director MICHAEL CHAVES and VERA FARMIGA and on the set of New Line Cinema’s horror film “THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Photo by Ben Rothstein