Film Land - What's Next for The Conjuring?

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This weekend marked the return of Ed and Lorraine Warren to the box office scene with The Conjuring 2.  The follow up to 2013’s shock horror smash dominated the box office over the weekend, crushing Warcraft in totals, and cementing The Conjuring as the latest dynamite horror franchise of the 2010s alongside Insidious and The Purge. 

Given that monster success and the low cost of the films to produce, a spin-off film entitled The Nun is already in production and a 3^rd film is entering the discussion phase.  However, a third movie would raise a lot of questions this time around in terms of setting, antagonist, characters, plot, and creative team.  Thankfully, I’ve broken these issues down into 6 central questions about what’s next for the Conjuring films. 

Week of Review - Vacancy

We are 3 installments into this shorter Week of Review as American Horror Story: Hotel looms ever near, rumbling towards us all like a kind collective, television based prostate cancer.  Today I’ll be looking at another 2007 horror film, because apparently that was just a really good year for hotel horror.  However, unlike Saturday’s 1408 today’s topic skews much more in line with the key trends and themes of horror in the mid-2000s.  As much as I like to talk about the amazing 4-year period of 2007-2010 as the time when the 2010s truly began I’m thoroughly aware that change doesn’t happen over night. 

As I mentioned 2007 was a horror landscape dominated by the twin success of Saw and the blossoming trend of horror reboots.  Texas Chainsaw and Amityville Horror had both come out in 2005 and made a ton of money with Rob Zombie’s Halloween picking up steam to complete the hat trick that same year.  Haunted house movies wouldn’t pick up again till the twin success of Paranormal Activity and Indisious and zombies didn’t fully enter the mainstream till 2010.  Combine all this with the still lingering impact of Eli Roth’s Hostel, also from the truly terrible year of 2005, and horror was in bad shape.  Which makes it all the more impressive that Vacancy, which conforms to all the horror tropes and standards of the day, is really good.