(TW: I guess? For horror?)
I love horror films: the good and bad, I always enjoy a horror flick, whether I am genuinely frightened or laughing at how bad it is. Consequently, I loved Jonathan Crane’s article on the problem of irony in horror.
One of my favorite horror series is The Conjuring. Still, I feel The Conjuring 2 (TC2) fits exceptionally well into this category of the interplay between irony and legitimate (or perceived legitimate) horror.
TC2 jumps the rope between laughable and terrifying in a multitude of ways. Like Crane declares:
“as the work of these directors departs further .. from the minimum threshold of credulity … the ironic audience now celebrates every moment where a director, crew, and cast went wrong … superior in the knowledge that the filmmaker cannot offer a worthy reply … the audience has license to revel” (146, shortened for sake of word count)
Here is what I would consider one of the most terrifying scenes in the whole series. As in, I was grasping onto my friend’s arm the first time I watched this.
In my opinion, there is nothing to laugh about here. We know that Vera Farmiga’s character can see into the spirit world, and now that the spirit world has come to infiltrate her home, through contextual awareness, the viewer is scared.
Rapidly, though, the movie jumps through a variety of different subplots and we suddenly move to England where a random child is possessed.
A grown man’s grovelly voice coming out of this child relates to the lack of credulity that Arnsen was discussing. In a sort of whiplash reaction I went from being scared out of my mind to laughing and pointing at how weird this scene was played out. I laughed at the silliness of it all, but because I respect the series and – to a certain extent – the director, I wasn’t so much laughing through an act of “perverse will and insider’s delight” (146), as Crane would put it.
(play from 4:40-end)
This is the following scene, and this one fits into an even weirder dynamic for me. The lead-up to the Crooked Man’s reveal is tense, but the weirdly-fitting special effects for his character just weren’t believable enough for me. Additionally, having him move so slowly allows the viewer to fully grasp who this monster is, rather than revelling in the fear of the unknown.