The Ghoulish Plot: A couple moves into a big old house with their family sometime in the late 70s. Turns out, the house was the location of some pretty awful witchy murders many years ago and the spirit of that very bad person still haunts the house, seeking to possess mothers and kill their children.

The family finds Lorraine and Ed Warren, who in the movie are very good people who help people deal with supernatural bad things and who in real life were complete and total scumbags who played on people’s emotions and religious beliefs to make a buck. But in the movie, they’re played by attractive movie stars and are not shysters with an Ouija board.

If you’ve somehow never seen one of these before, the first flick in this ever-expanding Conjuringverse of demon nuns and demon dolls is still by far the most effective and entertaining of the whole bunch, and (arguably) the only one with enough solid acting talent to raise it above the spook-house-in-movie-form the rest of the jumpy-scary movies have devolved into.

This is also the horror movie James Wan opted to make after his success with the “Saw” franchise, which devolved into dumber and dumber plot lines and inane traps and morality nonsense. This is a well-made modern haunted house movie with some fun jumps and surprises, and after it’s done you can just skip pretty much the whole rest of the Conjuring universe movies. And also do not look up Ed and Lorraine’s Wikipedia before you watch this; they were HUGE pieces of shit in real life.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: this movie can still make me jump in multiple spots. This time it was a specific scene involving hide-and-seek/clap, but there’s nothing particularly gory or gross.

Rating: 7 out of 10 Chick Tracts