Continue with the saga of watching the entire franchise in chronological events but I got to say thinking back in the day probably nobody expected a prequel to Annabelle to be any good, much less a prequel to a prequel that alredy sucked hard but here we are talking about Annabelle Creation and how it turned out way beter than I though. David Sandberg came in after making Lights Out and actualy gave us something worth watching, wich is wild because the first Annabelle was very trashy ngl, like I remmeber watching that one and being been like hhhmmm is this the demon doll they got locked, yeah is ugly AF but the movie not so scary. This movie gets back to basics with the horror stuff, good sound work, decent camera angles and building up tension without throwing jump scares at you every five seconds, it was all about context, this didnt feel some kind of desperate attempt to keep you awake, the whole setup with the orphanage girls staying at this creepy dollmaker house works pretty well, specially because you actualy end up caring about Janice and Linda and their friendship. These two girls want to get adopted togeather and have this whole future planed out, so when the demonic posession stuff starts happening, its more personal because there is something real here between the girls, instead of just random people dying for no reason, you know when you care about characters it makes everything else matter more and this movie actualy pulled that off. Now the movie is not perfect at all, it drags a bit in the first half with way to many loud noise scares that get old quick but once it gets going, things get prety intense and the demon stuff starts ramping up that actualy made me stay and pay atention, this was not what I was expecting from an Annabelle movie at all.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5140878/
- Platform: HULU
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The whole thing kicks off with this dollmaker Samuel Mullin and his wife Esther living with their daughter in this nice little house out in the middle of nowhere and everything seems perfect until they leave church one day, their car breaks down on the side of the road. The daughter runs out to grab a lug nut that fell off and she gets smashed by a truck coming around the corner, it happens so fast you dont even see it coming and then we jump twelve years ahead to these orphan girls showing up at the house, because the Mullins decided to open their home to help out. The thing is you can tell something is off from the start, like the wife never leaves her room and wears this creepy mask over half her face, claiming she got sick and the husband is just wandering around being all weird and quiet, acting like he has this dark secret hanging over him, which of course he does because this is a horror movie and everyone has secrets that come back to bite them. Janice is this girl who had polio, so she have trouble walking and has this big leg brace which makes her more vulnerable than the others and Linda is her best friend who looks out for her all the time, they have this plan where they will only get adopted together as sisters and it is actualy pretty sweet until everything goes to shit. The house has this one room that used to belong to the dead daughter and of course it is locked, and of course the girls are told not to go in there, but you know how that goes in horror movies, Janice ends up finding her way inside and discovers the Annabelle doll sitting in a closet, covered in Bible pages, and warnings scribbled all over the walls.
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What I liked about this movie compared to the first one is that it actualy uses the doll in creepy ways, instead of just having random ghost shit happen around it, like there are scenes where the doll is sitting on the bed and then the character looks away, and when they look back, the dolls head has turned to face them. Simple stuff like that works way better than all the complicated demon nonsense they tried to pull in the first movie, where the doll barely even mattered, here the doll is front and center doing what it should be doing, its way more active which is freaking people out by moving when nobody is looking. There is this awesome part where Janice is in the staircase elevator thing, because she cant walk up stairs easily and the doll appears at the top waiting for her, just sitting there all creepy and you know something bad is about to go down, like that kind of simple stuff with the proper sound and setup can be so creepy. The movie does a good job of building tension through these moments, instead of just relying on loud noises every ten seconds to make you jump, although there are still pleny of those, especially in the first half which got annoying after a while. But once the demon actualy starts posessing Janice and things escalate in the second half, I was locked in finding out how it would play out, the actress playing Janice does a really good job of going from sweet kid to full on creepy demon child and it never felt over the top or silly.
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The backstory they give for how the doll got posessed makes sense to within the universe they have set up with these movies, so after their daughter dies, the parents pray to anything that will listen to bring her back and they start seeing her ghost around the house, leaving little notes like she used to do when she was alive. They think it is actualy their daughter coming back to visit them but of course it is just a demon pretending to be her, so it can get invited into their home, demons need permission aparently its very cliche although I have read its a real thing, never met a demon though and dont want to, so they have to trick people into letting them in. Eventually the demon asks to move into the doll so it can stay with them forever and they agree like idiots, just like in the other movies, everyone just think they are helping their little girl when they are realy just trapping a demon in a creepy ass doll that will go on to terrorize people for decades, what a way to screw everything up for everyone else. The movie also try to make reference to other Conjuring movies and thats when it felt force, I think there was no need because it was all good aside from those reference. There is also a scarecrow in the barn that the demon posesses at one point and that whole sequence was pretty tense, with the girl trapped inside trying to get the axe while this thing is waking up and pulling off its mask to reveal demon teeth, I wish they had done more with that honestly because it was one of the creepier parts of the movie.
The gore is kept under control, no savage bloodbath or cutttings or dramatic exagerated pucking which I actualy apreciate after all this just girls, because you dont need to go overboard with blood everywhere when you can build real fear through atmosfere and painting that creepy psychological scenario, there is one brutal scene where the Ester Mullins gets ripped in half by the demon and nail by the wrist to the wall, there is also one part you see her top half crawling after Linda in the basement, which was pretty gnarly, yes there was blood on this scence but Im talking not Evil Dead Rise. What realy surprised me was how this connects back to the first Annabelle movie at the end because it ties everything together when Janice escapes through a hole in the wall after they lock her in the room covered with Bible pages and she ends up at another orphanage where she gets adopted by a nice couple. She tells them her name is Annabelle now, because the demon has fully taken over and then it shows her growing up over the years, until she eventually murders her adoptive parents with her cult boyfriend, which is exactly how the first movie starts, it was a solid way to connect everything, even if it relies on a massive coincidence that the neighbors in the first movie just happened to have an Annabelle doll sitting in their house. It was such a big WTF moment that this specific doll would end up right next door to where demon Janice is living years later. Solid horror movie that makes you think, maybe the franchise finaly figuring out that hiring good directors actualy matters, if they had made the first Annabelle like this one, people would have been way more into this whole spin off thing. I would give it a 6.5 out of 10 because it does what it sets out to do and delivers some cool scares, but it is not perfect and drags in spots, worth watching if you are into horror movies and a fan of the franchise like me.
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