With a full roster of spooky ghosts and a literal room full of references, Annabelle
Comes Home is stuffed with small details as opposed to the original Annabelle doll, which
is only stuffed with cotton.
Or whatever old Raggedy Anne dolls were stuffed with.
Fiberglass?
Maybe that's why everyone's scared to touch it it's devilishly itchy.
I'm not gonna touch the doll.
I'm not gonna touch it."
Call the babysitter, because we're diving deep into all the small details in Annabelle
Comes Home, and we're conjuring up plenty of spoilers along the way.
Right at the beginning, Annabelle Comes Home puts viewers on familiar ground.
If you didn't notice, the story picks up right where we first met Annabelle all those years
ago, in 2013's The Conjuring.
That film starts with the porcelain poltergeist terrorizing some girls in an apartment before
the Warrens step in to take that mean old doll off their hands.
Annabelle Come Home opens on a continuation of that scene, which both grounds the story
for longtime fans and gives it a firm chronological place in the Conjuring universe.
Of course, we also get a little insight into why the Warrens are so scared of Annabelle,
since the doll decides to bring half a cemetery back to life to terrorize the couple on the
drive home.
Geez, Annabelle, can't you chill for even one night?
"Honey, YOKAY?"
The one place you never want to go in the Warrens' house is into the artifact room.
That door has eighteen locks on it for a reason there's nothing on the other side but unimaginable
horror.
"Prepare to enter the scary door."
At least, that's true in the film world.
For viewers, the artifact room is undoubtedly a treasure trove of Easter eggs and references.
There, we can see the music box from the first Conjuring, right where Ed left it at the end
of the film.
There are also items that haven't shown up in the Conjuring world, but are taken from
the real world instead.
The book The Black Shuck alludes to a mythical ghost dog that supposedly roams the English
countryside.
And the Ferryman is a figure in multiple mythologies.
In Greek mythology, he was a dude named Charon who ferried souls across the River Styx for
a fee.
You like dead people, right?
I got a few dead people you might recognize.
Check this out.
Jackson, Grant, and look who's joining the party: Benjamin Franklin."
Like a teenage girl with a crush, or a mailman, Annabelle is a big fan of leaving notes.
"You always leave a note"
Specifically, she leaves notes with the spooky question "Miss me?" when she's in the throes
of haunting the living daylights out of someone.
This little detail goes all the way back to the first Conjuring film.
In that intro sequence, the girls find the message scrawled in red crayon on a crumpled
piece of paper.
In Annabelle Comes Home, the motif shows up in several different places, notably on the
haunted typewriter in the Warrens' artifact room.
Also worth mentioning is that the repetition, and the use of the typewriter, is reminiscent
of Jack Torrance's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" typewriter breakdown in The
Shining.
That may or may not have been intentional, but it's a nice nod to a horror classic if
it was.
One of the Easter eggs in Annabelle Comes Home happens early in the movie, when Mary
Ellen is in the supermarket.
She runs into her friend Daniela, and the two stop in front of a rack of comic books.
They were only onscreen for a second, but the specific comics really say a lot.
First of all, they're all DC comics.
No big surprise there the Annabelle films are owned by Warner Bros., which also owns
the DC extended universe.
You can catch the cover of a Detective Comics issue, as well as an issue of Strange Adventures,
starring the world's most super-powered archaeologist, Adam Strange.
"Beware the jub jub bird and shun the froooomiest bandersnatch.
Got your nose!
Heh heh heh!"
But most fittingly, Annabelle Comes Home director Gary Dauberman revealed that there's also
a Swamp Thing comic on the rack.
For those who don't know, Dauberman also co-created the DC series Swamp Thing, which was sadly
canceled before the entire first season could even finish airing.
Ed Warren was a man of many talents he was an author, a public speaker, and a ghost chaser,
and on top of it all he was really good at convincing people to pay him for all these
things.
But fewer people know that he was also essentially the Bob Ross of haunted houses.
"That building, that building looks as old as me.
And that's oooold."
Eddy's paintings have shown up in Conjuring films before.
At least, fictionalized versions have.
The one most fans know about is the painting of the demon nun in The Conjuring 2.
But Annabelle Comes Home introduces a new painting in Ed Warren's signature style and
not just any painting, but what looks like a rendering of the house featured in the previous
film, Annabelle: Creation.
It's not a perfect re-creation, but the placement of the tree and the remote house are pretty
much unmistakable.
Spooooky!
For those who don't know, the so-called real-life Annabelle doll doesn't look anything like
the eerie porcelain doll we see in the films.
In fact, the real thing looks downright goofy it's just a Raggedy Ann doll.
The story behind it is essentially the same, although no doubt embellished for the silver
screen.
Some girl got the doll, weird stuff started happening, and the Warrens eventually stepped
in to save the day.
Annabelle Comes Home did pay a little bit of fan service to the real doll in the form
of a quick clip of a gameshow on the TV.
Don't blink, and you'll see a contestant winning a classic Raggedy Ann.
It's not unusual for the people behind the scenes of a film to slip their names into
some text onscreen.
Annabelle Comes Home is no different.
During the scene at Judy's school, Judy inexplicably stops to stare at the bust of the school's
namesake, Father Michael Thomas Morrissey.
The name doesn't have any connection to the Conjuring universe or any of the Warrens'
investigations.
But it does bear more than a passing resemblance to Annabelle Comes Home executive producer
Michelle Morrissey.
Coincidence?
In the Conjuring universe, there are no coincidences only spin-offs.
Get ready for The Conjuring 8: Busted!, coming to theaters in 2027.
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