Annabelle: Creation 2017

A scary little girl (again), a haunted doll (again), and yet another spooky well. There are certainly no new ideas in "Annabelle: Creation" but son of a gun, it was pretty effective. Even the jump scares, which I normally hate, seemed appropriate. The house was a spooky place and the choice of not showing the doll walking around was smart. The actresses playing the two youngest girls, Janice and Linda, were quite good.

There were some things that really bugged me, though. With all of the people in the house, why were so many solo scares? How did no one else hear the screaming? Especially Janice's encounter with the soul-seeking demon on the staircase. Janice screams as an evil entity pushes her wheelchair across the yard and into a shed. Yet everyone hears her screaming from inside the shed but not as she is yelling in the yard, out in the open, where the other girls are. There seemed to be a lack of attention to details at times.

"Annabelle: Creation" has some good scares and its got a limited amount of gore. It's rated 'R' and that surprised me. It's a decent haunted house story without excessive bloodletting.

The biggest disappointment was the lack of a payoff for the scarecrow tease. Scarecrows are scary.

This movie gave me a revelation. About movie-making. Both in a good way and a bad way. On one side of the coin, you now have studios like Blumhouse and Rat-Pac making decent competent horror movies that will satisfy audiences, as opposed to the shit that was being churned out for the last few years. But on the other side of the coin, they're not doing anything super unique or original. You always have to have child actors, you have to have the priest, you have to have a demon, you have to have this old secluded house where people move in, and etc. It's not automatically bad or lazy to use these tropes, but only if they're done with a unique style. And the problem is, I've seen a TON of movies lately use these common ingredients. I liked Ouija: Origin of Evil, but again in that, there was a demon possession, a priest, and house with a dark history to it. I get that doing this is safe and people will go to see it, but I'm hoping directors like David F. Sandberg and other people working with Rat-Pac try to move away from these plot threads. I don't know how much longer I can stand studios think they can get away with using this story over and over. That goes for you too Blumhouse.

Sorry, that was something I had to write down, because I started thinking about it a little more towards the end of this movie. In general, I start to know how I'm going to rate a movie when I reach a certain point. And I knew then how I thought of this Annabelle: Creation. It's safe. It works, but it's safe, and I don't know if I like that or not. I'm a huge fan of older horror pieces and B-movie-esque grindhouse, and it's a little sad directors and executives aren't trying to push the envelope.

But with everything out of the way, this on it's own isn't bad. It's pretty good. The child actresses all do a great job with the script they're given and I believed I was watching actual children interact with one another, which is a problem sometimes with kids. Lulu Wilson, who already starred in Ouija: Origin of Evil, gives another solid performance, and I want to see what else she does with the horror genre, if she decides to keep acting in it. I would love to see a The Exorcist-eque movie with her getting possessed. I believe she could pull off a Linda Blair. But in this, she isn't the one who gets taken over by a demon, but still perseveres and gives us a great scared child acting job. Talitha Bateman, who acts opposite Wilson and the two of them are like bonded sisters, she especially delivers an exceptionally dreary and depressing performance. She's crippled with polio and spends most of the movie in a wheelchair or walking with a support. And what I liked about this facet, is that it wasn't a tacked-on sub-plot or sob story; her condition plays into some of the scares. In one scene, she uses the automatic moving chair thing on the staircase to get away from the demon that's coming closer to her. The chair makes it's way down, but stops and malfunctions half-way down. Then the chair starts to go back up, and the demon is waiting for her right at the top and there's nothing she can do about it. If she didn't have the condition, she could've just ran out of the house. But little touches like that can make for a richer story. It's also why the girls are surprised later when she can walk fine, because she's taken over. Another great scene was in the barn with one of the older girls, played by Grace Fulton, when the demon takes over a scarecrow and slowly unscrews the lightbulbs in fixtures to turn off the lights. I don't know why the demon would care about something trivial like light-fixtures, but I guess you could say because the demon is used to being shut-in the darkness, so whatever. It was a nice set-up.

And this re-telling leads me to one of the bigger pros and cons with the movie. Each of these scary sequences are great, well-done little pieces, but as a whole feature, doesn't really flow well. There isn't a lot of super big tension built up or a looming threat that lurks over the picture. In one scene, Wilson is terrified beyond belief as the doll and the demon have made their way into her room and the bed underneath her bunk-bed. But then, the scene ends, she falls asleep, and it's the next day. Next we see her, she's happily playing with the other girls. Are we not going to talk about what just happened there? And that's my only big problem with this. David F. Sandberg started out doing short horror movies and that seems to be his expertise. These are great little scenes, but don't complement one another always in the larger scope of it all. However, the movie does get really good towards the end, when the demon goes all out on the girls. It was nice to see something quite grand and on an ambitious scale. A lot of times with these movies, the finale is just a small group of people trying to get out of a house and there's a couple jumpscares there and here. But Sandberg decides to throw in everything he can. The demon teleports all over the place and gets at the different separated groups of kids. Scarecrow in the barn? Check. Creepy adventures in the basement? Check. Car won't start? Check. Hiding in the doll room? Check. I know all that sounds very cliche, but it's done rather unique, as it's not the same person who experiences all of it.

But I think I've rambled on long enough. It's a little funny seeing how these origin prequel horror movies end up being better than the originals they're based off of. Now people are going to go watch the first Annabelle and remember just how fucking terrible it is. But I am a little worried about the state of horror movies. I liked this, it was good, I had fun watching it, but I want to see more come out of this genre. I don't really want to see the same plot threads being copied over and over. If you just want to see a fun horror movie to share with friends or family, you'll definitely get a kick out of this, I recommend it. However, as massive fan of this genre, I want more.