The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy lies on a waterbed and his spine bends the wrong way. The mattress rolls under him. That rolling is the detail doing the real work, because you cannot see what has hold of David Glatzel, but you can watch the water answer it. Every possession film has the same problem, and this is one of the more elegant solutions to it: how do you photograph a force with no body?

James Wan's answer, which Michael Chaves inherits here, was a camera that drifts off the person speaking and settles on an empty corner of the room. It holds. Nothing arrives. Deleuze has a precise name for what that shot spends: the out-of-field, everything a frame implies without showing, and he splits it in two. The relative out-of-field is the next room, the hallway, the doorway just past the edge, somewhere a thing could physically walk in from. The absolute out-of-field is different in kind: a sense of something beyond the frame that has no location at all, that you could not reach by panning further. Wan's glide runs both at once, and that is why it works on people who don't believe in demons. The move promises the relative (watch that doorway) while the film's theology insists on the absolute (it is not in the next room; it is not in rooms). Chaves keeps the machine running, and Michael Burgess, his cinematographer since The Curse of La Llorona, lights the darkness so it genuinely obscures rather than merely looking moody. The empty space stays honest. That matters more than it sounds. A negative-space shot only pays if the film has never once cheated it.

Then there is the knife.

Arne Johnson kills a man, and nobody disputes the act. The trial is about which situation the act belongs to. Deleuze, borrowing from Peirce, calls this an index of equivocity: a gesture that could be read into two entirely different situations, with the film refusing to say which. Usually it is a small device, a man reaching inside his coat. Here it is the premise, and it is historically real. In 1981 a Connecticut defense actually attempted to enter demonic possession as grounds, and the case is remembered because American law had no procedure for an equivocal act. That is a genuinely rich thing for a horror film to be handed.

What Chaves does with it is the film's most consequential formal decision, and you can see it best against the two films before it. The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 are what Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image: an encompassing situation, a house with a family sealed inside it, presses on people until somebody performs a decisive act that transforms it. Situation, then action, then new situation. The house is antagonist and container at once, which is why those films are so tight. This one runs the shape backward. It begins from an act and works outward to disclose a situation that was hidden all along, which Deleuze calls the small form: the deed comes first, the world is revealed through it. That is detective structure. It is the reason the picture feels procedural rather than architectural, and it explains the complaint critics kept making. You cannot be trapped in a small form. Terror in the first two films was a property of walls.

Once the house is gone, the film needs a different spine, and it uses what Deleuze calls a vector, or line of the universe: a zig-zag trajectory stitching together spaces that have nothing to do with each other, held in one piece only by the people crossing them. Woods, a morgue, a courthouse, a cellar. Burgess has to light all of it, and the mobile location-hopping palette replaces the single-house design. At the bottom of the vector is the occultist's altar, staged as ritual architecture rather than domestic horror, and this is the film's best image after the waterbed. Deleuze would read the 1981 New England kitchens and courtroom benches as a derived milieu and the cellar as the originary world underneath it, a place of pure drive that the social surface is only a crust over. He finds that structure in Buñuel and Stroheim. The Conjuring Universe found it under a house in Connecticut.

And there is Lorraine's face. When the camera watches her watch something we cannot see, Deleuze would call that a dicisign, an image in which the camera perceives a character in the act of perceiving, so that you feel the framing itself as a second consciousness. Farmiga's face is the film's principal effect, more reliable than any rig. But notice what happens to it. Deleuze's seer, the voyant, is defined by the impossibility of acting; the situation exceeds every available response, so the character can only look, and time becomes visible in the gap. Lorraine is literally a seer, and the film converts her seeing into a lead within a scene. Vision becomes evidence, evidence becomes pursuit. That is precisely what commercial horror does with the discoveries of modern cinema: it borrows the iconography of the one who can only watch, then plugs her back into the sensory-motor circuit. The invented occultist completes the operation by supplying a binomial, a force to set against a force, converting diffuse dread into a chase with a body at the end of it.

Which brings up the thing the film chooses not to be. The Amityville Horror codified the based-on-a-true-case brand, a haunting sold as documented fact, and the Warrens' occult museum and case files are that brand made into set dressing. Deleuze's powers of the false describe cinema that takes undecidability as a creative principle, where incompatible versions are both true and no narration can arbitrate. A film about the Johnson trial has every ingredient for it. This one declines. It shows you the demon in the first reel, so the court's unanswerable question is answered before it is asked. That is not a failure, it is the genre contract, but seeing it clearly tells you what kind of object you are holding. Not a film about whether the devil made him do it. A film in which he did.

So what is actually invented here, by Chaves and by Wan as story co-author? One thing, and it is structural. Possession becomes transferable. The passage from the boy to the adult is staged as a physical, bodily event, and that changes what possession is for cinema. Deleuze's gest is a posture that exposes a relation rather than expressing a feeling, and the contorted body is exactly that: the demon has no face, so the relation has to be performed as an attitude. Making that attitude portable turns a condition into a plot. The Exorcist had already fixed the terms this film inherits, practical in-camera body horror intercut with skeptical adults treating exorcism as a procedure to be documented and verified. The Conjuring 2 supplied the screenwriter, the silence-into-sting sound design, and the demon as a physical antagonist. Annabelle: Creation had already proved a non-Wan director could operate the house style. The real experiment here is whether a formal signature belongs to a person or to an apparatus, and the answer, uncomfortably, is that it mostly belongs to the apparatus.

One last thing worth holding onto. This was released to theaters and HBO Max on the same day, which means a technique built on the darkness at the edge of a huge frame was delivered to a lot of people on a television in a lit room. The out-of-field is not only a formal property. It depends on how far away the edge is. Watch it again and time the empty corners. Count how long the film is willing to hold nothing.