The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Conjuring 2 (2016) Full Movie HD TS

Janet Hodgson has been hearing voices. She’s the second-eldest of four kids, all living with their recently single mom Peggy in a low-rent, government-funded flat in north London. When the voices escalate into waking nightmares, physical attacks on Janet, and bone-chilling visitations from an elderly ghost, there’s only one husband-and-wife team of demon-busters the Hodgson family can call: Ed and Lorraine Warren, back for The Conjuring 2.

RatingWhen director James Wan chose to base the heroes of his 2013 horror blockbuster The Conjuring on real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, he took an obvious, unprecedented risk: that casting aside the horror film tradition of emphasizing European religious rites and mythos in favor of leaving the ghostbusting to an American couple of DIY exorcists from Connecticut would pay off.

in the sequel to his box office smash, Wan has taken another great risk: telling the Warrens’ version of the Enfield Poltergeist story, a tale so well-known in popular culture as a proven hoax that not even the real-life Warrens’ insistence that it was true can overcome the public’s general skepticism. So instead of trying to work around the real-life elements of the Enfield story, including the proof of the hoax, Wan has embraced them, bringing both the historical skepticism that followed the Warrens and the natural skepticism of every horror audience into his film.

The result is a paradox: The Conjuring 2 is as scary as it is noncommittal. Unlike the first film, the sequel sheds doubt again and again on both the legitimacy of the events happening onscreen — at some points explicitly addressing the historical proof of the hoax — and the Warrens own beliefs. Paranormal enthusiasts, skeptics, and agnostics all have an equal shot at feeling validated by the film’s take on historical reality, while also ultimately agreeing with Wan’s cinematic philosophy that terror is terror, regardless of the source.