Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Conjuring 2
2016 · James Wan · The Conjuring 2 on Sightlines
The camera is moving down a hallway in a council house in Enfield, 1977. Patterned wallpaper, worn carpet, cold grey light from a window somewhere. A doorway slides past on the left, dark inside. The move is slow, smooth, and it keeps going. Somewhere in that glide you notice you've stopped following the story. You're searching the black rectangle of the doorway for a shape.
Most of the time nothing is there. James Wan has trained you to look anyway, and that trained eye is the best way into The Conjuring 2. It is also a good place to bring in Gilles Deleuze, whose two books on cinema are really about what films teach us to do with our eyes.
Deleuze split cinema into two broad regimes. In the first, which he called the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it. Every cut and every camera move serves that chain of seeing and doing. In the second, the time-image, the chain breaks. People can no longer act on what they see. They just watch, and we watch them watching. You might expect a haunted-house film to belong to the second regime, since it's full of frightened people frozen in place. It doesn't. The Conjuring 2 is a movement-image built with great care, and seeing why tells you exactly what Wan invented.
Start with the doorway. Deleuze uses the term out-of-field for everything a frame implies but doesn't show. He separates two kinds. The relative out-of-field is the space next door, the room you could reach by panning a little further. The absolute out-of-field is a sense of something beyond the frame that has no place at all. Wan works almost entirely in the first kind, and he works it harder than almost anyone. His wide, distant framings and long scanning takes turn every threshold in the Hodgson house into a place where the next thing might be standing. And when the demons come, they come from a place. The Crooked Man and the nun Valak show up in doorways. They can be located. That is why they frighten you in the gut rather than haunt you like a riddle.
The craft behind this is old. The Haunting (1963) taught horror to crane slowly over charged empty rooms and let sound carry the threat. The Innocents (1961) planted an ambiguous figure deep in the background while the foreground held our attention. Wan uses both debts openly. What he adds is the length of the take.
Deleuze has a name for what a moving camera does. He calls the shot a mobile section: a slice of time in which the whole set of the image changes. Several of Wan's set pieces are a single mobile take that reframes to reveal a presence, or pointedly fails to. Within one unbroken shot, a room changes from empty to occupied. Nothing in the house has moved, but the whole house now means something different. Practical effects make this possible. The furniture really moves, rigged on set, in the same space as the actors. André Bazin argued that when the truth of an event depends on two things sharing the frame, the editor must keep his hands off. Bazin wanted that rule for realism. Wan uses it for fear, and Poltergeist (1982) is the ancestor he answers to: a working-class family under siege, with objects coming to life in camera rather than in post.
Then there's the blocking. Characters are often placed so that we see what they can't. Deleuze filed this kind of suspense under Hitchcock and the relation-image: meaning that lives in a relation the viewer is holding, with the audience as a knowing third party in the room. Kirk Morri's editing builds the rest. Long calm stretches teach you a habit, which Deleuze would call a mark: when the camera drifts like this, expect a blow. Then Wan stretches the habit until it hurts, and the shock lands when you've half stopped bracing.
The film comes closest to breaking its own system in the skeptic subplot. The real Enfield case was dogged by claims that the children faked it, and the film stages a sequence where Janet seems to be caught cheating. Deleuze would call this an index of equivocity. A single act could belong to two different situations: a scared girl faking, or a girl whose hands aren't her own. The voice pushes this further. In the interrogation scenes, a deep, guttural voice tied to the Bill Wilkins persona comes out of Madison Wolfe's adolescent body. The voice is inherited straight from The Exorcist, and for a moment the sound and the body don't match.
In the modern films Deleuze admired, a crack like this would be left open. Wan closes it. The ambiguity gets pulled back into the large form of the action-image: a situation presses on everyone until a decisive act transforms it. First disturbances, the investigators' arrival, a crisis of doubt, a confrontation. It's the investigation structure of The Exorcist and the true-case-file frame of The Amityville Horror (1979), run at the patient tempo of The Changeling (1980). Underneath it all is a clean duel of force against force, the Warrens against the demon.
The film's warmest scene shows why this matters. Ed Warren sings Elvis's "Can't Help Falling in Love" to calm a terrified family. It's a man repairing the link between seeing and doing with nothing but his voice. Patrick Wilson plays it straight and Vera Farmiga's Lorraine, haunted by premonitions of loss, gives that repair its stakes. The action-image here is more than machinery. It's a promise that fear can still be answered.
That is the film's significance. In an era of digital spectacle, Wan showed that the old grammar still works at studio scale: a set with clear geography, a camera that scans it, and a shock that's earned. His craft has been widely imitated since, and the film seeded Valak, who went on to headline The Nun. The terrace was built in Los Angeles because Wan needed to control every corner of the space before he could break into it.
So watch it again and watch the doorways. Then watch yourself watching them, and notice where the camera has taught your eye to go. And stop at the moment Janet may be cheating. What would this film be if it had let that question stay open?
Concepts in play
- Relative out-of-field — Slow, unbroken camera moves past doorways and down hallways that make the viewer scan negative space; the Crooked Man and Valak show up in doorways, threats that can be located next door
- The shot as mobile section — Set pieces built around a single mobile take that reframes to reveal a presence, or pointedly fails to, so the meaning of the whole house changes within one shot
- Relation-image (the viewer as knowing third) — Blocking that places characters so the audience sees what they don't
- Mark — Morri's long stretches of calm or slow drift teach a habit (this kind of move means a shock is coming), which the film then delays and pays off
- Index of equivocity — The skeptic subplot in which Janet appears to be caught cheating: one act readable as fakery or as possession
- Action-image, large form — Classic haunted-house escalation: first disturbances, the investigators' arrival, a crisis of doubt, a climactic confrontation that transforms the situation
- Binomial — The Warrens against the demonic presence, a duel of force against force that resolves the film's ambiguities