Monday 18 March 2013

Monday Trailer: The Conjuring

I had a trailer post for today planned out and ready to write up when, about an hour ago, one of my housemates asked me if I had seen the trailer for a new film called The Conjuring. As soon as I began loading it I realised that I'd heard of it before, as the follow up film from the makers of Insidious.

The Conjuring


The film focuses on a family of seven who, after suspecting they are not alone in their home, call in renowned ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) to seek out and destroy the evil that is terrorising them. Unlike both of the trailers that I have posted about so far this one is entirely focused on narrative, to the point that it plays out almost as a stand-alone sequence taken from the film. With Insidious and his earlier film Dead Silence, director James Wan displayed a great prowess within the horror genre and, in particular, an adeptness at crafting clever and suspenseful scares, and that is brought in full force within this trailer. 

The premise of the trailer focuses on two sequences which feature the mother of the family (Lili Taylor) playing hide and seek with her children and investigating a noise from the basement. Both feature slow pacing and a reliance on extremely creepy jump scares that, rather than being predictable, build up and surprise. The trailer also features two brilliant uses of contrapuntal music, the first being the jovial song that opens the trailer and evokes a more family-friendly film, and the second being the old familiar eery music box tune that has become a stable of the genre. 

I find it interesting that the trailer has avoided divulging any of the ghost hunter storyline and also fails to acknowledge it's two biggest stars in Wilson and Farmiga. I'm sure that this trailer is being used to preview the style of the film and to set a tone for what is to come in the finished product. I think that its extremely effective and it has definitely gained my immediate interest in this film. The Conjuring is released on July 19th.


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