Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour The Conjuring: Last Rites And What's Making Us Happy About this episode The Conjuring: Last Rites winds down the story of the demon-hunting couple loosely based on Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. They battle one last threat: a house in Pennsylvania that contains a haunted mirror and a terrified family. The Conjuring franchise has generated billions of dollars across many films and spinoffs full of hauntings, demonic possession, and creepy dolls. But does this film have a new story to tell?
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0:43 Stephen Thompson? The horror franchise The Conjuring has generated billions of dollars across many films and spinoffs, full of hauntings, demonic possession, and creepy dolls. Now The Conjuring: Last Rites purports to wind down the story of the demon-hunting couple whose exploits inspired the series. But does it have a new story to tell? I'm Stephen Thompson, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is the host of Weekend Edition Sunday, Ayesha Roscoe. Hey, Ayesha.
1:12 Speaker 02 Hey, hey. May God be with you.
1:15 Stephen Thompson? And also with you. Also with us is NPR's Culture Desk correspondent, Neda Ullaby. Hey, Neda. Hey, hail Satan.
1:25 Stephen Thompson? I'm sure we'll leave that in.
1:29 Stephen Thompson? So The Conjuring movies are based very loosely on the lives of Lorraine and Ed Warren. They were a real-life couple who claimed to investigate paranormal activity, demonic possession, haunted houses, that sort of thing. They're played in The Conjuring movies by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson and are portrayed as a deeply loving couple with an unshakable bond. The Conjuring: Last Rites brings their story to a close as they battle one last demonic threat, a house in Pennsylvania that contains a haunted mirror and a terrified family. The Warrens are near the end of their careers, giving lectures to indifferent crowds when they're not doting over their adult daughter Judy, played by Mia Tomlinson.
2:10 Stephen Thompson? But they get slowly and inexorably sucked back into demon hunting, even as it endangers their lives and members of their family.
2:17 Speaker 03 That thing in your attic is a demon. It's the first one that we ever encountered. We were young, and we were scared, and we almost lost our daughter. So we told ourselves that the risk was just too great. That we couldn't chance going back.
2:35 Stephen Thompson? The film was directed by Michael Chavz, who also directed The Conjuring, The Devil Made Me Do It, and a couple of other movies in The Conjuring cinematic universe. It's in theaters now. Ayesha Roscoe, I'm gonna start with you. What did you think of The Conjuring: Last Rites?
2:50 Speaker 02 I loved it. Okay, let's just get it out of the way. I loved it. I've seen all of The Conjuring movies. And so I didn't come in with, like, high hopes. For this one, I loved the first one. I think sequels are always tough, right? But I love a scary movie. Doesn't matter whether it's really good or bad. Or, you know, that's just my thing. I'm just, I'll go and enjoy. But I, you know, honestly, felt like this movie took some surprising twists that I didn't expect, right? Not like shocking. I'm not gonna say that it was like, it wasn't a shocker. But I was looking for certain beats. And where I thought they were gonna go right, they went a little bit, you know, a little left. A little left, not all the way to the other direction, but a little left.
3:35 Speaker 02 And so it was enough to get me drawn in. And it was enough for me to be like, well, where are they going with this? It definitely had the big scope of like, this is an ending. I was thinking of this as like, you know, Conjuring: Endgame.
3:50 Stephen Thompson? Sure.
3:51 Speaker 02 It was like they brought in all the nods to the other stuff. If you watched it early, the candle thing and the scary dolls and all that. But I felt like they didn't layer it on so much that you were like, oh, my gosh, this is just some slop. Like, I felt like they were a little held back. I really did. And then the scares really scared me. And maybe I'm totally biased, but, you know, the couple who I love, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are amazing. Like, their chemistry, I love them as a couple. I just love them. And I was so touched by the story. And I kid you not, at the end of this movie, the person beside me was crying.
4:35 Speaker 02 They teared up. They were so touched at the end of this movie. I kid you not. I was not the only one moved up in there.
4:46 Speaker 02 So yes, I really liked it.
4:48 Speaker 04 Okay, how about you, Nita? Well, I totally agree with Ayesha. I thought the first Conjuring movie, which was directed by James Wan, was a lot of fun. In general, though, I would say that I think this is a $2.3 billion series. It's the most lucrative horror movie series in history. And I think this one is going to have no bigger fans than movie theater owners who are counting on it to sell tickets between now and when the next Tron movie comes out on October 10th. But what did you think of the movie? I thought it was all right. I think a lot of horror movie fans, like me, think the first two were good,
5:30 Speaker 04 that the Shav's entries have been okay. You know, and there are a lot of horror movie fans who feel ethically dubious about the entire Conjuring enterprise to begin with. But we can get into that later.
5:44 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, I think for me, it's pretty hard to hand wave away the ethical elements of this film. That these films are based on the accounts of various... You're going to hear the scare quotes when I say demonic possession. That these films are based on the stories that this real life couple has told. The film is extremely credulous in the way that it portrays these people. And to me, I mean, I'm delighted to hear Ayesha talk about how much she loved it. Because I think that, you know, first of all, I want movies to be good and I want people to like them. I just found it so slow. I felt like it's all building to a, you know, kind of a climactic showdown, as so many of these movies do.
6:28 Stephen Thompson? But I felt like the way the film is structured, you're getting a lot of the Warrens, you know, personal lives. They've got this daughter, she's got a boyfriend, they're in love. And they're the heroes who are, you know, on the hero's journey, they're resisting the call. There's a lot of them kind of resisting the call. And then we get a lot of this unrelated family in Pennsylvania dealing with this haunting. And the film, to me, just takes forever.
6:57 Stephen Thompson? To get to the point, to kind of just get to, you know, where they're actually facing this big bad. And so to me, I was kind of bored with the structure of the film. And I think my overarching issue with the Conjuring movies in general is I find the forces that they're battling feel very generic and indistinct, in part because we've all seen haunted house movies, we've all seen demonic possession movies, and nothing they're facing feels like it's much of a metaphor for anything kind of beyond the typical like fear of demonic possession, which we've seen in a thousand Exorcist movies and, you know, any number of other franchises. And so for me, like, the one thing that's distinct about these
7:41 Stephen Thompson? movies is the portrayal of that couple. But then I have all these ethical issues with this couple and the way that they're portrayed.
7:52 Speaker 04 Oh, I have ethical issues with the pacing, too.
7:57 Speaker 04 The fictional couple is tremendous.
7:59 Speaker 02 They're amazing.
8:01 Speaker 04 The performance of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga is truly, I think, the strongest thing that the Conjuring franchise has going for it.
8:10 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
8:11 Speaker 04 They should win Academy Awards. And there is something interesting about how they're really positioned as Christian superheroes at this cultural moment.
8:19 Speaker 02 Well, that's the thing that I wanted to get into. It's so interesting because it is a Christian superhero story with crosses and the Bible and Jesus. And I'm like, where else do you see that in popular culture on such a huge scale? It's a very surprisingly conservative part of horror and which I think a lot of people don't realize, or because the way it's sold, they don't even pick up on the fact that it's very religious. Like, you don't get that in other genres. Like, you just, like, where people are seriously
9:00 Speaker 02 like, let me get the word. Oh, my gosh, the cross is upside down. The devil. Like, I am a Christian, but it is fascinating to me to see this on such a large scale.
9:14 Speaker 04 I reported a piece about this movie in the backstory because it is such an incredibly popular and lucrative franchise. And I talked to this bestselling horror writer named Grady Hendrix, who I think is just the bee's knees.
9:26 Speaker 02 Yes, I've read a lot of his stuff. We had it on Weekend Edition Sunday. Yes.
9:29 Speaker 04 He's wonderful. He's kind of a student of the occult and popular culture. And he told me something that as soon as he said it, I was like, oh, this makes all the sense in the world. But like you, it hadn't even occurred to me. So he said that the Warrens, the real life Ed and Lorraine Warren emerged and started to craft their image after the success of the exorcism novel and movie, which itself was super popular, partly because Vatican II had just happened in the 60s. And there were a lot of very hardcore priests who felt that Vatican II made the church too liberal, and that it needed to go back to its true mission, which was fighting the devil in all of its manifestations. And Ed Warren was among that kind of Catholic who
10:12 Speaker 04 felt that Vatican II had made the church too liberal, and that one of the things that the Catholic Church needed to do was fight the devil when it inhabited people's bodies and tried to make them do bad things.
10:23 Speaker 02 Oh, my gosh. Yes. No, that makes total sense, because the church is often standing in the way of the Warrens doing the work, you know?
10:32 Speaker 04 The Vatican II Church.
10:33 Speaker 02 The Vatican II Church. You gotta go back.
10:37 Stephen Thompson? It is definitely a secondary battle, is not only kind of the skeptical bureaucracy of the church, and skeptics themselves. Skeptics themselves are treated in these movies certainly like obstacles and at best kind of misguided fools. And as a person who is fairly skeptically inclined, I do not enjoy being made the villain of your horror movie.
11:00 Speaker 02 But isn't that the way it is in most movies, Steve, in horror movies? The skeptic always gets it. The skeptic is like, I don't believe this or ever. And then here comes the monster stabbing you in the back. See, you're so dumb. You should have believed it. But I agree.
11:16 Speaker 04 There's a lot of things that's dangerous to be in horror movies. I'm just gonna put that out there. You know who always gets killed first?
11:23 Stephen Thompson? There are very few horror movies where there's one subset of people who are just always safe.
11:27 Speaker 04 That's right.
11:28 Speaker 02 And I will say too, that these movies as exorcism movies, I mean, I love The Exorcist. That's like my favorite movie. These aren't really an exploration of faith, whereas The Exorcist was an exploration of faith and often exorcism movies, which I also love.
11:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:45 Speaker 02 Are, I mean, I'm talking about in general, exorcism movies are about an exploration of a person's faith and why they might not have faith or why they would have faith. Whereas I will say Conjuring is not that. It's not a deep exploration of why people believe or don't. It is really about, it's almost like The Fast and the Furious, because it's about family.
12:08 Stephen Thompson? It's about family, yeah.
12:13 Speaker 04 I think it is about family. I talked to Michael Schaub about what it was that he felt like this movie had to say about what's happening culturally right now. Because, you know, we were just talking about how The Exorcist reflected what was happening with Vatican II and horror movies so often reflect sets of cultural anxieties and fears. You know, like the radioactive monsters during the atomic age and like the rise of second wave feminism and final girls. So I was like, Michael Schaub, what do you feel like The Conjuring movies have to do with right now? And we had been talking a little bit about how the movies really lean into this kind of evocation of the 1970s and 80s. And it's this kind of, you know, we see this a lot, like the Stranger Things, kind of like
12:56 Speaker 04 nostalgia for the time when the horror movie makers themselves were reading their Stephen King novels and watching The Exorcist and it's kind of summoning up that moment. And can we just play a little tape of what he told me about what he thinks the movie has to say about right now?
13:11 Speaker 05 I, I think the feeling of a working class family in that time that could not get ahead is very powerful. That was something that was always on my mind. And when I thought about the Smurls and I thought about how they just, nobody would listen to them and no one, you know, they just, they were a good Catholic family. Why would this thing happen to them? They can't quite get ahead. And that feeling of kind of just dreadful anxiety, I think that's really palpable today as it was in the 70s. And I think that that was, you know, part of the emotion and the feeling I wanted to capture.
13:42 Speaker 04 And to be clear, I think you can guess this from the context, but the Smurls are the family.
13:46 Speaker 05 Right.
13:46 Speaker 04 Whose house is haunted in the movie.
13:48 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, and it's interesting, that portrayal of the Smurls and the kind of working-class neighborhood they're in. I definitely chuckled several times during this movie at the way it sort of presents like Pennsylvania, land of sorrow.
14:01 Speaker 02 It's very gray there. It's so gray.
14:04 Speaker 04 Very post-industrial, yeah.
14:07 Speaker 02 It was never sunny and bright. It was very dark.
14:11 Stephen Thompson? Smoke stacks.
14:13 Speaker 02 But I think that is very compelling to people, like that 80s, you know, aesthetic and they were such a happy family. That was another thing I was hearing in the theater. It's like, they're so happy. Look at the Smurls. They're so great. They have the little twins running around.
14:33 Stephen Thompson? It seems like exactly the sort of family that would really benefit from a haunted mirror.
14:37 Speaker 04 I'll tell you how it kind of struck me. This is a movie about desperately trying to keep a family intact.
14:43 Speaker 05 Right.
14:44 Speaker 04 Right? And who among us hasn't had this experience that, using the internet as a bit of a metaphor, we are surrounded by these powerful forces unseen that live in our walls, that whisper to us, that tell us narratives that cause us great anxiety.
15:03 Stephen Thompson? That are listening to us.
15:04 Speaker 04 That are listening to us, that seem to cause relatives sometimes to say the most horrible things. And you look at them and you're like, what are you saying? I can relate. I mean, can't you?
15:16 Stephen Thompson? Wow. Neta, you just made these films make so much more metaphorical sense to me.
15:22 Speaker 04 Well, I think partly why horror movies are just so scary. Do you remember when J. Horror was a big thing, Japanese horror? There was like the Ring movies. And I interviewed the guy, the Japanese novelist who wrote the original Ring novel, through a translator. And he was so amazing and moving. And we were talking about the cross-cultural appeal of horror. And he said, we do not know when the mouse laughs, but we know when the mouse is frightened.
15:48 Stephen Thompson? I love that.
15:49 Speaker 04 That has always stuck with me.
15:53 Stephen Thompson? One other thing that I wanted to talk about, the kind of based on a true story of it all, really rubs me the wrong way.
15:59 Speaker 02 That's the thing, like when it deals with the real people. And I don't know that it even needed to deal with the real people.
16:05 Speaker 04 I agree.
16:05 Speaker 02 You hear about, you know, the people on the screen. You know, when you look at based on a real story, you don't really think it. I mean, you don't think this is really real. Of course, it's a movie.
16:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
16:17 Speaker 02 You know, did they really need to have that element of it? Because really, it was about the casting. It's about the writing. It's not about just being able to say, oh, based on a true story. I don't know that that's why anyone even likes The Conjuring, right?
16:32 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, I think that is definitely one of my issues with it. For one thing, by this point, these stories feel derivative, right? Like, it feels like a derivative of other horror franchises. So why not just use that as a jumping off point instead of giving us these crawls about what happened to real people? But, I mean, look, $2.3 billion?
16:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:54 Stephen Thompson? Clearly, Aisha Roscoe has contributed to that $2.3 billion.
16:59 Speaker 04 Hey, she went to a screening.
17:01 Speaker 02 I did it for work.
17:01 Stephen Thompson? I bet you're buying merch.
17:03 Speaker 02 Oh, I love.
17:03 Speaker 04 I bought the DVD.
17:04 Speaker 02 Look, I'm putting the poster up. Listen, I am a part of the problem. I'm not going to say I'm not a part of the problem. I'm not going to say that.
17:12 Stephen Thompson? All right, well, we want to know what you think about The Conjuring: Last Rites. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com/PCHH and on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/NPRPopCulture. We'll have a link in our episode description. Up next, what is making us happy this week?
17:31 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon with their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR.
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18:17 Stephen Thompson? Now, it's time for our favorite segment of this week and every week. What's making us happy this week? Aisha Roscoe, I'm going to start with you. What's making you happy this week, buddy?
18:25 Speaker 02 Okay, I like to always bring something kind of old and offbeat for what's making me happy. You know, I love animation and I love superheroes and stuff. And so I've been watching Batman versus Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It's a movie and you can get it on Prime Video or any of them, but it's basically like a crossover between the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman, and it's animated. And I just think it's so much fun. You know, you have Shredder and the ooze in Gotham with Ra's al Ghul and all that stuff. And it's just, it's just like a fun thing. Like, we deal with so much serious stuff.
19:09 Speaker 02 And if you like superheroes and you just like, you know, turtles that eat a lot of pizza and stuff, I'm saying, just turn it on, rent this and have some fun, because life is dark.
19:21 Stephen Thompson? Love it. Thank you, Aisha Roscoe. Neda Ullaby, what's making you happy this week?
19:26 Speaker 04 So there is a local band in my community that I love, and they feel very apropos for this moment. They are called Fangs and Twang.
19:34 Stephen Thompson? Okay.
19:35 Speaker 04 And the way they describe themselves is they fuse Gothic horror, cryptozoology, classic rock, Americana, and outlaw country. Their songs have names like "Undead" and "Unwed," and "Jesus Drove a Wooden Cross Through My Heart," and a song that I've pulled called "You Monster."
20:12 Speaker 04 This band is, I think, just about the best thing ever, and more people should know about them.
20:16 Stephen Thompson? Now, your community, Neda, we don't need to pinpoint your exact location, but these days, you live in Michigan.
20:23 Speaker 04 So I live in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and if ever there was a place that had a band called Fangs and Twang, this would be it.
20:30 Stephen Thompson? All right. Thank you, Neda Ullby. So what's making me happy, the band Ivy was a source of many minor pop pleasures over the course of six albums in almost 20 years. And when I say minor pop pleasures, I don't mean that as any kind of slight. It's just that Ivy's songs had a certain breeziness and lightness that really, really worked for it. And, you know, the band was a trio of Andy Chase, Dominique Durand, and Adam Schlesinger, who was also a member of Fountains of Wayne, among many other projects. And Ivy's last album came out in 2011. Adam Schlesinger unfortunately died in 2020, so it certainly seemed like we'd never get any more Ivy music. But the surviving members and some key collaborators
21:15 Stephen Thompson? have assembled one more album, working from a cache of old Ivy demos. And the songs are lovely and bittersweet. They sound fully fleshed out and complete, and they all incorporate recordings that contain Adam Schlesinger's work with his family's blessing. The album is called Traces of You. It's a deeply bittersweet project, but it also lives up to the Ivy records that came before it, as you can hear in one of the singles, "Say You Will."
22:00 Stephen Thompson? So yeah, it's a lovely song, a lovely little piece of nostalgia and a fine way to celebrate the legacy of a dearly missed genius. That is Ivy and their new album, Traces of You. That is what is making me happy this week. If you want links for what we recommended, plus some more recommendations, sign up for our newsletter at npr.org/popculturenewsletter. That brings us to the end of our show. Neda Ullaby, Aisha Roscoe, thanks so much for being here.
22:27 Speaker 04 Thanks for having me. So much fun. Thank you so much. I really had a good time.
22:31 Stephen Thompson? It has been a blast. This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Janaye Morris, and Mike Katzif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next week.
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