The Conjuring is the terrifying tale of one family’s experience moving into a supposedly
haunted Rhode Island farmhouse, but before we meet the family, we’re introduced to another case,
from the archives of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. I personally wouldn’t
call any movie that involves ghosts, demons and witches “a true story” but these events
are based off of real places and people that Ed and Lorraine encountered in their careers,
and the film contains hidden references to some of these real world ideas.
For example, when we see the Warrens’ cursed artifact room, it contains many paintings
of historic looking houses. These aren’t just for effect, they actually call back to Ed and
Lorraine’s early days of investigating. As the story goes, the two would drive around,
and Lorraine would use her medium abilities to detect houses with a supernatural presence.
Then Ed would create sketches of the house, and they would go up and offer the artwork to the
homeowner, hoping to be invited in, where they could ease into some questions about
possible paranormal activity.
Not you. Ed’s artistic ability comes back and becomes a major part of The Conjuring 2,
but before it would, there would be connections to The Warrens allegedly real
case files. To see the truth about the connection between Bathsheba and Annabelle,
as well as other disturbing Conjuring secrets, stick around to the end of this video.
Welcome to Things You Missed. The first two mainline Conjuring movies came out in 2013
and 2016 respectively, and since Things You Missed came out in 2017, I ended up making
episodes on all of the Conjuring spin-offs before I ever did any of the mainline movies.
In a way, that might actually be a good thing, because the spin-offs are based off of urban
legends, but they’re more fictionalized, whereas the main series is adapted from
The Warrens’ actual case files. Again, that doesn’t automatically make it a true story,
The Warrens CAN make stuff up, and let’s face it -- they do -- but there is something there. The
Perrons DID get creeped out by this old house. The nurses DID become paranoid about this doll.
So putting off these episodes until now gave me time to read about the cases and find even
more Things You might have Missed in the movie, so with that being said, let’s get into them.
The movie begins with Ed and Lorraine presenting details about the Annabelle
case in a lecture hall, and many of their students are holding a book or pamphlet
titled Seekers of the Supernatural. This isn’t one of their books, but rather,
the name of an audio program that aired in 1998, 27 years after this scene takes place,
but maybe this pamphlet was an early version of this information.
You can tell the movie starts in 1971, not just because of the title right here,
but also because of the hard country dish towel aesthetic of the entire movie. We first meet the
Perron family as they are moving into the property known by most as The Old Arnold
Estate. The Conjuring was directed by James Wan, and moving is a common idea in his movies. His
2007 movie Dead Silence had the protagonist Jamie moving out of his old town when he was young,
and his 2010 pic, Insidious, focuses on the Lambert family, who moves in, and then
quickly moves again, but it turns out, “it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s your son.”
The Perrons soon discover the cellar, which we later find out was the place where Mrs. Walker,
who lived in the house back in the 1930s,
ended her life after her son Rory disappeared in the woods.
“Nancy, can you go get me the matches please?” “What’s going on?”
Oh nothing Mom, Dad’s just gonna burn the house down.
No, but maybe they WOULD have been better off just burning the house down. The next morning,
their rooms are freezing and the daughter, Andrea complains of a smell the previous
night. There are multiple instances of the characters encountering this smell. Roll it.
“That smell again…”
“Andrea was here and she said that Christine took off with Christine
and April. The girls said she smelled like rotten meat.”
Which is kind of ironic for a spirit named BATH-sheba, but the idea to associate the
foul smell with the haunting may have come from these books written by Andrea,
the oldest daughter of the five. She describes an array of unexplained smells, however,
unlike the movie, not all of them were bad.
There was one ghost that Andrea described as a mother, who “smelled like Ivory soap”
and another who smelled of “flowers and fruit.” But she also described rancid scents including
one that they claimed would hit the house every morning at 5:15 AM, which I’m guessing was the
inspiration for another aspect of The Conjuring: the fact that the clocks stop at the same time
every night at exactly 3:07 AM. The 3:07 comes from the time of death of the supposed witch,
Bathsheba Sherman. All in all, the whole move-in process was a little rockier than expected.
“You still too fried to Christen the new house?” “Who said I'm fried?”
Dude you already have like 5 daughters, give it a rest. The wife, Carolyn, wakes up the next
day with some bruises, and they too are inspired from real events. Well, not “real”. You know what
I mean. In Andrea’s writing, she expresses her belief that Bathsheba was out to get her mother.
“She loathed my mother, she lusted after my father.”
She claimed there was an incident where the spirit stabbed Carolyn in the leg with a knitting needle,
the same weapon she supposedly used to kill her child before hanging herself on the tree.
With The Conjuring, James Wan is going for a much more subtle horror
than the crazy events described in Perron’s books, so in the movie,
Bathsheba gradually covers her in bruises, making her think she has some kind of iron deficiency.
However, some parts were… not so subtle. The air yeeting would soon begin.
Yeah, these movies really like the air yeeting.
But another thing they like to
put in these films is: the easter eggs. As I’ve discussed with my other James Wan movie analysis’,
there is often a hidden image somewhere with Billy the Puppet from Wan’s breakout film:
Saw. The Conjuring is actually the first Wan movie NOT to feature a cameo from Billy,
however, there would be a familiar icon from the Saw franchise. The youngest
daughter April discovers this music box, which features a spinning spiral pattern,
which is also the calling card from the antagonist of the Saw franchise. The box
contains a clown that bounces up and down, whose design is very very similar to the clown puppet
in Wan’s 2007 movie Dead Silence, who fittingly, also becomes a vessel for a lingering evil spirit.
But it wouldn’t just be Wan’s own creations that are referenced. The real life Lorraine Warren
served as a consultant for The Conjuring, and she would make a hidden cameo appearance of her own.
In the second lecture scene, Ed and Lorraine show their audience footage
of the possession of a French-Canadian farmer who once helped Lorraine’s family member in Romania.
“Take Maurice here. He’s a French-Canadien farmer, had nothing more than a 3rd grade education,
yet after he was possessed, spoke some of the best Latin I’d ever heard.”
This is yet another example of something Andrea claimed to have witnessed. At one point,
the real Ed and Lorraine attempted to conduct a seance to try and speak to
the dead that lingered in the house, and Andrea supposedly snuck downstairs to see it. She wrote:
“My mother began to speak a language not of this world in a voice not her own.
Her chair levitated and she was thrown across the room.”
The levitating chair idea was obviously used in the finale, but they must not have wanted
the foreign tongue idea to go to waste, and so -- squeezed it into *this scene*
where Ed and Lorraine wowed this paranormally curious audience. One of these audience members
was Lorraine Warren herself, the real Lorraine Warren, who can be seen sitting in the front row.
As I mentioned, Lorraine was a consultant on the film who was on set to ensure that the filmmakers
were keeping things “historically accurate”. Whatever the **** that means for a ghost story.
The funny thing about this, is that it’s basically more of an honorary role. The script makes
Lorraine look good, it makes her look like the hero, and this is probably because the movie is
an adaptation of the Warrens’ case files, not an adaptation of Andrea Perron’s books. My point is,
that Lorraine has no incentive to step in and say “oh you know what? I lied. We actually made
things worse for them.” Which, according to the Perron family is basically what happened.
In an interview with The Providence Journal, the father, Roger, says that his wife’s body was
possessed, so the Warrens attempted to perform a seance to simply try to talk to the spirits
in the house, as opposed to the exorcism seen in the movie where they try to drive Bathsheba out.
After the seance, Roger says he kicked the Warrens out, and that was the end of that.
“You get NOTHING! You LOSE! Good day sir!”
They had to keep living in the house until they could finally afford to move out in the early 80s,
where they claim they were continually haunted. Not quite the same as the feel-good ending of
the book. Now, did the Warrens really make things WORSE? No, probably not. This is likely
an example of confirmation bias. Because the Perrons already believed in the supernatural,
they interpreted everything they saw in the house as something supernatural, and I think this is
dramatized in the movie by actually giving the kids a touch of clairvoyance themselves.
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the horror genre, kids,
pets and old people are always the ones who can see ghosts.
When they first arrive at the house, the dog, Sadie, seems to be the only one who
realizes that there are evil spirits lurking there, refusing to step foot inside. I mean,
step paw inside. Then there’s the youngest daughter, April, who tells her Mom that she
made friends with a boy named Rory, who we later learn is one of the kids who formerly lived on
the property; the boy who disappeared in the woods that I mentioned earlier.
The second youngest daughter, Cindy, is a chronic sleepwalker,
and at one point the paranormal investigators determine that she’s
not just sleepwalking around randomly, she’s actually being led by a spectre.
“She didn’t trigger it.” “What do you mean she
didn’t trigger it?” “Somebody’s with her.”
Drew hears Rory’s voice over EVP saying “Hey, over here.”
and “Follow me. This is where I hide.”
By the time they get into the room, she’s disappeared, but they eventually find
that her sleepwalk led her into a secret area behind the wardrobe. It reminds me of this one
time when we were kids and my sister fell asleep behind the futon, it was kind of against the wall,
but there was a gap. My parents got really freaked out. But like many elements of this movie,
this too references something from the Perron sisters’ childhoods.
In the movie, they pass the time by playing Hide-and-Clap, and in reality they did like
to play Hide-and-go-Seek. One of the first times they played Cindy tried to hide in the woodshed
and climbed into this box, but when nobody found her and she wanted to come out, the lid wouldn’t
move. With her air supply cut off, she screamed and cried for 20 minutes until her sister Nancy
showed up and easily opened it. There was no explanation as to why the lid got stuck
So the two youngest seem to have made contact with the other side. What about the third youngest,
Christine? In the infamous, figure-behind-the door scene, Christine is the one who says this…
CHRISTINE: “There’s someone standing over there.”
NANCY: “I don’t see anyone.” CHRISTINE: “It’s looking right at us.”
What I find interesting about this scene, as opposed to some of the other scary scenes
where we actually see Bathsheba, is that there’s actually no one there. I can bring up the lights,
I can bring down the contrast, it’s just a dark corner. I think James Wan is telling us,
by shooting it like this, is that she can see something that her sister can’t,
which is a really unsettling idea, because it means she had to deal with it alone.
So it seems that these three younger girls can see some spirits both good and evil,
while the two older girls and the parents cannot, and of course Lorraine is the most gifted medium
out of any of them because, you know, it’s based off her writing, she’s gotta be the hero.
“Supa-hero Lorraine Warren”
There is one other possible example of one of the two younger girls seeing a horrific
event from the past, that you’ll only pick up on by paying close
attention to the small details in the background of these scenes.
“Maybe it’s just time we take a break.”
Let’s look at the part where Ed and Lorraine are researching the grim past of the property.
Lorraine shares her findings including details about several tragedies that
have taken place there since the 1860s, when Bathsheba cursed anyone who would
try to take her land. This includes the Walker family tragedy, a boy who drowned in a pond,
and a maid who lived on the property. There is one article she doesn’t mention to Ed,
but we see it on her desk. The headline reads: 4 Children Killed in Tragic School Bus Accident.
We’ve already seen that the school bus picks up the Perron girls right at the edge of the
property, so it makes sense that this area could be part of Bathsheba’s influence.
It seems Lorraine found it important enough to cut out and paste into
the book alongside the article about the pond accident, so it must be significant.
That brings me to April and Cindy’s room, where you’ll see a picture of what appears to be two
parents and a kid standing in front of a school bus, with what appears to be a cross in the bottom
right corner. It’s not likely that this is a picture of the Perron sisters going to school,
because we clearly see that there are four of them who march off to the bus in the mornings.
So it could be that the younger sisters have seen the unrest spirits of this school bus accident
in some capacity, the same way Lorraine sees the gruesome incident taking place in the cellar.
There’s more evidence for this in the secret area behind the wardrobe.
Cindy has been known to travel there in her sleep,
and when they eventually find her, April mentions that she knows about the location too.
“That’s where Rory hides when he’s afraid.”
When Lorraine explores it, she finds some toys on a shelf, including a school bus positioned
as if it’s crashing into a red pick-up truck. The shelf below contains an overturned car…
It remains unclear if the school bus crash was at one time supposed to be a bigger part
of the story, or if it was always supposed to be more of a bonus detail for observant fans,
leading our eyes to find more obscure details hidden away in the children’s rooms.
I also noticed this picture in the bedroom of Judy, Ed and Lorraine’s young daughter. It appears
to be a rooster that says “Mister Wilson”. I’m not sure if the picture itself is significant,
but I wonder if the “Mister Wilson” is a nod to the actor that plays Judy’s father,
Patrick Wilson. Not the Weezer one. Wilson is James Wan’s most frequent collaborator
having been in five of his movies, with a sixth currently on the way.
One night when Carolyn hears a disturbance in the house,
she wanders downstairs to investigate when she hears…
[CLIP]
...which may sound familiar -- these are the same three notes
that Carolyn plays when she first discovers the piano in the cellar.
I had to do some digging, so this is not my discovery, but rather,
a trivia bit I found on IMDb. The piano notes could be a reference to
the melody heard in the 1973 movie, The Creeping Flesh.
The Creeping Flesh is a British movie, and this The Who poster next to the wardrobe
in Christine and Nancy’s room contains a British flag. Could this be a clue about
the location of the Warrens’ next big case in The Conjuring 2 taking place across the pond?
No, probably not. Honestly, probably not. That’s just looking too much into it.
BUT, let’s look too much into the camera angles. The Conjuring uses camera orientation to denote
the presence of evil. It first comes up when Bathsheba’s presence wakes Christine
in the middle of the night by pulling her ankle. She starts by looking under the bed,
and we see her POV, which is upside down, as she notices the witch standing beside
her door. The camera flips with her as she sits up to look at the dark corner.
The technique is used again at the end of the movie, when Lorraine leaves the basement where
Bathsheba is being held to get her bible so that they can perform the exorcism,
and the camera flips from upside-down to right-side up. Then as she returns,
the camera inverts again, to signify her return to the lair where the evil resides.
Of course, if you’ve seen the movie, Ed does successfully perform that exorcism. And if you
haven’t seen the movie, I seriously don’t know what you’re doing on this video, and this far
into it to boot, but before we wrap this one up, there’s one more big mystery I want to hit on.
The Conjuring would be followed up one year later by the first spin-off,
Annabelle, which is teased at with this commercial, I mean scene, in The Conjuring,
where the doll escapes and nearly attacks Ed and Lorraine’s daughter,
Judy. But how is this evil entity able to escape from a super locked case in a
super locked room? The details in the scene and the scenes leading up to it, have the answer.
First, let’s take it back to when Ed is explaining the situation to the Perrons. Roll it
“Sometimes when you get haunted, it's like stepping on gum. You can take it with you.”
By these rules, it stands to reason that our paranormal investigators could also be
victims of this, and during Lorraine’s investigations something grabs her locket,
with the picture of Judy in it. This shows Bathsheba who Lorraine cares about the most,
so Bathsheba shows Lorraine an image of her daughter in danger,
which cause Lorraine go back and check on her, unknowingly leading the witch to her home.
Then, one night while Judy is asleep, it’s her copy of the locket that starts shaking,
before she wakes up, while the clock reads 3:07 AM,
the same time that Bathsheba always caused the clocks to stop at in the Old Arnold Estate.
You shouldn’t need any further proof, that Bathsheba was the one to free Malthus, the spirit
inside of the Annabelle doll, but if you do, look no further than Judy’s recount of the events.
“There was someone rocking in the chair with Annabelle.”
Judy also has some clairvoyant abilities, as we see in The Conjuring 2 and Annabelle Comes Home,
so this is her saying that the inhuman entity residing in the
Annabelle doll wasn’t the only thing she sensed. Bathsheba had tried to
scare The Warrens off of her case by going after her young daughter.
The Annabelle case is one of 1968 is one of the most well known Warren cases,
but there is one even more famous one, that is referenced at the end of the movie,
when Ed and Lorraine return home and touch base with Father Gordon.
“If we can, he’d like to meet with us tomorrow.
There’s a case in Long Island he’d like to discuss.”
She's talking about Long Island, New York, where the infamous haunting of the The
Amityville Horror takes place, which leads us right up to the beginning of The Conjuring 2,
where Ed and Lorraine investigate that very case in the film’s opening.
There is a movie entirely dedicated to The Amityville Horror, I’m sure
you can guess what it’s called, but that film is not a part of
the series of movies that we like to refer to as “The Conjurverse.”
And for now, we’ve only got one more movie to cover in The Conjurverse,
and that is The Conjuring 2, which happens to be my favorite of the
franchise and it’s loaded with hidden messages and secrets.
So click that playlist on the left to see the full collection of Conjurverse analyses',
and if you love the world of evil and spirits, make sure you subscribe to CZsWorld. I’ve
got new episodes of Things You Missed and Horror Histories on your favorite
Conjuring demons and characters coming very soon. Make sure you ring that deathbell for
notifications. I’ll see you in the next one. Assuming we both survive.