After opening with the month with a primer (listen) on Ed and Lorraine Warren, Jenn and I have spent August tackling their first few cinematic adventures. This includes the Perrons/The Conjuring (listen), as well as the Warrens’ brief appearance in The Enfield Poltergeist, which is based on the events that befell the Hodgson family in the late 1970s (listen).
Now we’re up to James Wan‘s sequel, The Conjuring 2 (2016). Released three years after the first blockbuster introduced Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), the sequel promotes the pair to full-blown evangelical saviors who are willing to cross the ocean to save a family.
The reality is quite a bit less illustrious: Society for Psychical Research member Maurice Grosse (played by Simon McBurney in the film) actually led the charge to investigate the supernatural hauntings in Enfield. He basically lived with the Hodgsons for months, recording every bump and knock in photographs and on tape.
By comparison the real life Warrens arrived unannounced, spent (at most) a few hours in Enfield, and then were politely sent back to the States.
In The Conjuring 2, however, the horny empath and her demonologist husband repeatedly save the day, offering comfort and solace, as well as much needed house repairs to poor single mother Peggy (Frances O’Connor). They also advise Janet (Madison Wolfe) on how to navigate the spiritual world and perform an Elvis sing-along before Ed nearly dies in the Final Destination-esque climax.
It’s in this last act of the film that Wan and his co-screenwriters, David Leslie Johnson, Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes really shift away from “fact” into full-blown fiction. It makes thematic sense to introduce a demonic nun adversary (Bonnie Aarons) to test Lorraine’s faith, but (perhaps just as importantly) following the success of Annabelle, the sequel prominently features another character ripe for a spin-off.
That may not have been the original plan, but, in no time at all, this film was succeeded (and its box office gross surpassed) by The Nun in 2018.
Want even more Murder Made Fiction? Be sure to check out the pod’s Patreon feed, where Jenn and I have 130 episodes and 85 hours of exclusive content including episode by episode coverage of shows like Monster, Ryan Murphy’s anthology series about Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers, as well as Hulu’s The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.
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