Ahead of the highly anticipated release of The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It, STARBURST was invited to a press conference with the cast and crew behind the top-rated horror franchise. The latest instalment takes a look at the true story of the trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, and Ed and Lorraine Warren’s involvement in the infamous case.
Stars Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, and Ruairi O’Connor are joined by director Michael Chaves, producer Peter Safran, and franchise creator James Wan to answer questions on what makes this the darkest film of the franchise, the challenges they faced, and what audiences can expect from The Conjuring 3.
The Devil Made Me Do It breaks from the haunted house tradition which has so far defined the series. Director Michael Chaves explains that “for any franchise to stay fresh, there needs to be invention and reinvention. We wanted to tell a Conjuring story in a way that we hadn’t seen before.” As such, the decision was made to keep this as “more of a supernatural thriller, where we’re taking the Warrens on the road.”
“The great thing about the procedural is that you’re going into different environments and working with different people. It’s taking you outside the comfort zones. At this point in their careers and in our experience of the Warrens, the haunted house has become a comfortable setting,” Chaves states. “This gives us an opportunity to take them into places that we haven’t seen.”
This film has also been marketed as the darkest entry yet, which Peter Safran explains is due to it being “a true story that involves a murder. There’s a real victim in this case, it’s not just a family being terrorised by something unholy. That inherently makes this the darkest of the movies… Prior to this, we’d only seen bad things happened to a dog and some birds, so this was different.”
And because it was so dark, Patrick Wilson stresses the importance of leaning into the love and positivity elements of the Warrens’ story. “When you centre the love between Ed and Lorraine, it frees you up to go as dark as you want in the other aspects,” the actor explains. “We don’t go halfway with either; if you’re going to have these terrifying scares, then we want to have the most full-of-love moments that you can get. And it does get very operatic.”
The Warrens are “the personification of love,” agrees Vera Farmiga. “For me, it is more of a love story than it is a horror story, and that’s what makes it so unique and successful. And not only do the Warrens love each other, but they also have a lot of love for the work they do… And for the people that they help, that selflessness and that compassion is something holy and special, that makes it that makes it digestible and beautiful.”
Ed and Lorraine “become the through-line between all these films, and that’s one thing that sets us apart from other horror franchises,” Wilson continues. “You’re following the good guys instead of the villain.”
James Wan explained how this all fed into the essence of the franchise, and of his own filmmaking ethos: “I want to tell the stories that I want to watch as an audience… it’s telling stories with characters that people can relate to.” Filmmaking to Wan “is about creating characters that are beloved and real. The more grounded you make it, the more you can play into the scares and horror scenes.”
The Conjuring 3 also introduces Ruari O’Connor as the central figure of Arne Johnson. As the series newcomer, O’Connor explains that coming to the film was “a huge challenge for me, because I’m very scientifically minded and very cynical. I remember talking to Vera on set a lot and she has this really warm openness to there maybe being some kind of paranormal, or something beyond. She’s just kind of playful with it,” he recalls. “And we’d be talking about little spooky things that happened throughout the filming of The Conjuring and other films as well. And I was just wishing that I would get some kind of spooky event that would just like bait me into it, but unfortunately it didn’t happen!”
This is the first of the Conjuring films to move into the beloved ‘80s era, which lent The Devil Made Me Do It a particularly interesting quality. Chaves explains that seeing Ed and Lorraine working alongside detectives and police departments is “something we hadn’t been able to explore before.” But it was interesting because the ‘80s were a time “when a lot of psychics and clairvoyants were working with police departments – so much so that the Department of Justice actually issued a handbook in 1989 to formalise rules on working with psychics. The other thing in the 80s was the dawn of the Satanic Panic… there’s a lot of cool textural things that play in the backdrop of this movie.”
The Conjuring 3 certainly delves deeper than ever before into Lorraine Warren’s supernatural abilities. Farmiga explains that this film “delves deeper into her gifts and abilities as a psychic. This time around, through the nature of their detective work, her ability gets put to the test… we see other aspects of her clairvoyancy, different types of cognition like precognition, retrocognition, remote viewing, not only the telepathy and clairvoyance. And she’s able to do what she does because she has [Ed’s] support.”
The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It is out now in cinemas.
