Critics reviews

It earns a high spot on this list not necessarily for its faithful interpretation of truth but its solemn capture of familial unrest. The Conjuring creates, through roving cameras and increased claustrophobic tension, a sense of the kind of family that may be haunted by violence – though not necessarily the supernatural kind.

Some may find The Conjuring un-scary; it doesn't go in for shock moments (more like chills down the spine). But it works like Rosemary's Baby, another film where the heroine's obvious distress was much more frightening than any talk of Satan; it grips because it's about people trying to deal with a bad thing, even if that bad thing happens to be malevolent spirits.

Cherry-picking some of the best tropes from a golden era, director of The Conjuring James Wan, with screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes, combines the ambiance of horror's leisure-suit heyday with the more recent brand of well-timed what's-that-in-the-mirror scares.

Wan respects us enough not to lean on absurd effects and drunken editing to attempt to spook us. He holds his shots and uses wires to drag bodies across the living room and make chairs float off the floor. The movie's absurd enough to get an audience screaming. It's just that if you've got Taylor, Farmiga, Wilson, and Livingston in a movie, the script should have more for them to do than duck when antiques fly at them and stare down crazy dolls.

Director James Wan follows up Insidious (2011) with another relatively bloodless haunted house movie. Like its predecessor, it's generic and lazy as storytelling, but this time there's almost enough playful camerawork to distract from the feeble conception.

The dread gathers and surges while the blood scarcely trickles in "The Conjuring," a fantastically effective haunted-house movie... Mr. Wilson makes Ed an appealing, somewhat ridiculous square, which fits nicely with Ms. Farmiga's unsmiling intensity and undercurrents of fragility. Their characters are as appealing as the Perrons, but Mr. Wan smartly keeps enough distance from the Warrens that you can see that these true believers are also hovering at the edge of dangerous fanaticism.

More so than the actual scares — and there are plenty of those, too — The Conjuring succeeds because of all that anticipation of dread things to come. The damned thing works you so well that you may even consider leaving halfway through, for fear you'll have a heart attack.

The man behind the first Saw film and Insidious understands how to amplify moments of unspoken dread until they become nearly unbearable for an audience afflicted with anticipation. Wan's latest, The Conjuring, is even more dedicated to the buildup of horror than his previous films. It delivers a haunted-house narrative so immersed in the protracted fear of its characters that each long camera take feels possessed.

Wan is a carnival barker at heart, and as a delivery machine for goosing his audience, The Conjuring is primarily intended, like Insidious before it, as a haunted-house attraction, a woozy ride through a hall of goose-bumpy horrors. Except that the film's legitimately tense, competently orchestrated scares aren't so much excitingly old-fashioned as they are tiresomely derivative.