The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It continues the franchise’s turn toward more over-the-top supernatural scares but is this second sequel actually scarier than the original Conjuring? Released in 2013, The Conjuring was a huge sleeper hit for director James Wan. Unlike his earlier 2010 hit Insidious, The Conjuring kept most of its scares low-key and built suspense slowly.
Although Insidious had its share of slow-burn sequences, it took an unabashed turn into fantasy-horror territory late in the game. Once Patrick Wilson’s hero ventured into an astral dimension, Insidious became a full-blown Nightmare On Elm Street-style fantasy horror. In contrast, The Conjuring surprised many critics and viewers with how reserved and subtle its scares were. The story of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s exorcisms and ghost-hunts may have been exaggerated from their real-life inspiration, but the movie’s depiction of a family being haunted by a malevolent witch’s ghost built tension gradually and only gave viewers glimpses of its villain.
The success of The Conjuring - which earned over $300 million on budget of only $20 million - led to inevitable sequels and spinoffs. Wan returned to the director’s chair for 2016’s The Conjuring 2 which was seen by reviewers as a step up from possessed doll spinoff Annabelle. However, thanks to its demonic nun villain Valak, the sequel was also a less subtle affair that relied on bigger jumps scares and more screen time for its villains. Now, the third Conjuring covers the pair’s involvement in the trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, prompting some to wonder whether it is as scary as the original. Sadly, while The Conjuring 3 does feature some undeniably effective jump scares, it is not as creepy as the original. There are plenty of ambitious CGI-assisted glimpses into the world of demons, but fewer sequences that can match the original’s haunting "hide and clap" scene.
The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It starts strong, as the addition of a police procedural angle allows the sequel to take a skeptical stance toward demonic possession. However, once Conjuring franchise heroes Ed and Lorraine Warren arrives on the scene, it relies on more appearances from ghoulish demons than the original. Where the first film in the series built tension slowly and spent an hour with the haunted family before Bathsheba’s first appearance, here the demons are more front and center and less effective as a result. Luckily, the third Conjuring is still a gripping crime drama and an involving story, just one that features less unbearable tension than Wan's first entry.
As proven by Wan’s earlier horror franchise Saw, many series in the genre start strong but struggle to outdo their predecessors with each passing entry. Where The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It works best is when the movie is replicating the uneasy tension of the original and leaving the source of its horror mysterious. Unfortunately, much like director Michael Chaves’ earlier Conjuring spinoff The Curse of La Llorona, the threequel does start overexplaining during the second half and features more screen time for its demonic villain. Ultimately, the third movie fails to match the original’s fear factor because, as horror has proven so many times before, less is more.