“The Conjuring” series are movies beloved by horror fans. As an end to the series, director Michael Chaves released a movie about the case that ended Ed and Lorraine’s paranormal hunting charades. As the last movie of the series, fans showed to not be too pleased with how the movie was made. Ed and Lorraine had taken a break from involving themselves in the spirit world when Ed started to have fatal heart problems. However, after a family was given a haunted mirror, Ed and Lorraine’s adult daughter started having premonitions of the mirror and the family who owns it, and felt obliged to help them. Realizing what their daughter is getting herself into, Ed and Lorraine follow her to family living in Pennsylvania to protect her from the evil attached to the mirror.
Throughout the movie there are a few chilling moments and jump-scares that could startle an audience, however, according to (The Movie Review), “…Those moments become overshadowed by laughable attempts at scaring the audience”. On the contrary, reviews from (Rotten Tomatoes) along with other movie review websites claim that this movie was “… Easily one of the best of the entire franchise”. Meanwhile, I fell asleep quite a few times while watching the movie. It is long, sappy, and in general, not scary. The elements of the movie are too unrealistic to truly strike fear into someone. You would think the last movie in the Conjuring Series would leave fans chilled to the bone on how scary it is, yet the movie was the opposite. The new movie, rather than being based on scaring an audience, is based mostly on teaching the value of family and having faith and trust in yourself. A true horror movie, especially one that is a part of the Conjuring series, does not base its values around that.
As a whole, the movie was not the best and personally I don’t exactly recommend horror fans to go into the movie expecting to be scared since we were under the impression that it would be the “scariest” movie to end the series. However, there were scenes that did a good job at scaring me during the movie. There were one or two jump-scares that caught me off guard and then the scene where Judy is trying on wedding dresses in a room full of mirrors was, as (Deadline) put it, one of the “franchise’s most breathtaking scares”. Personally, I think the movie could have been done a lot better and had a lot more sinister/eerie qualities to it, but I will give the credit it deserves in saying that it effectively scared me in the few moments where there was a real jump-scare/intense scene. Overall, I would not recommend this movie to anyone, but if you want to watch a movie that isn’t particularly scary, then this is the one for you.
