Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Conjuring
2013 · James Wan · The Conjuring on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the corners and doorways instead of the faces. (camera)
Wan and John Leonetti compose thresholds, the dark under furniture, the mouth of the cellar, and then hold. The frame is loaded with places for something to be, and the cut does not come.
Payoff: You finish reading the picture and keep scanning it, which means the film has you doing the frightening. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). A frame packed with information you are invited to read is what the reading calls a closed set.
Listen for a loud shock that never actually arrives. (sound)
Joseph Bishara's strings press in before anything is visible, then the track drops to near-silence. Wan builds toward a bang and repeatedly declines to ring it, so the next promise costs more.
Payoff: The film is tuning you rather than scaring you continuously, so your own anticipation does most of the work.
Follow the camera as it glides through the whole house. (camera)
Long crane and Steadicam takes travel up the staircase, through doorways, room to room. By the end of the first act you know the farmhouse's floor plan as well as the family does.
Payoff: The film teaches you the geography on purpose, so later you always know which unseen room a sound came from.
Watch Farmiga and Wilson play the Warrens as a marriage. (performance)
They touch, they check on each other, they work as colleagues who go home together. Lili Taylor plays Carolyn's state as ordinary exhaustion first. Nobody in the cast plays it as genre.
Payoff: That plainness buys the supernatural material its credit, so the strange events land as frightening rather than silly.
Look at the objects the film keeps returning to. (setting)
A music box, a boarded cellar door, a doll behind glass in the Warrens' room. Julie Berghoff dresses the 1971 house so these props sit in ordinary clutter until the film picks them up.
Payoff: Each object arrives already loaded by other horror films, and Wan plays that training on you as an instrument. In the reading: mark. An object that means something because of a chain of films you were trained on is what the reading calls a mark.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the edges of the frame. Wan composes the empty parts more carefully than the faces.