If you like horror movies that play like thrill rides, then you're gonna love Annabelle Comes
Home.
In this Conjuring spinoff, the gloves come off the ghosts in a way the franchise has
never attempted before.
If you got lost in the chaos, here's what went down in the closing minutes.
Before getting into the ending, let's revisit some important details.
"Nice doll."
"That's what you think."
As most would guess from her messed-up mug, Annabelle is obviously a haunted doll.
But the haunting works in a specific way, leaving her more or less devoid of personality
especially compared to her haunted doll compatriots in the Child's Play and, uh, Toy Story series.
While the doll can give off the impression of possession, Annabelle isn't really a character
of her own she's more like Billy from James Wan's own Saw series, serving as a mascot
and tool for the true forces of evil.
Rather than having consciousness herself, she serves as what Lorraine Warren calls a
beacon for other spirits, essentially boosting the wi-fi signal for any ghosts in its vicinity.
This makes her very useful for ghosts and demons, and uniquely deadly to living people.
Vulture described Annabelle Comes Home as the Avengers: Endgame of the Conjuring Universe.
But it's really more of a Suicide Squad, introducing a whole team at once in the hopes that maybe
one or two of them will get their own spinoff down the line.
With the adult Warrens out of town, their dangerous artifact room is left under the
care of just two people their daughter Judy, and a babysitter named Mary Ellen.
The duo is joined by Daniela, a friend of Mary Ellen's, as well as Bob, a guitar-playing
grocer's son who has a crush on Mary Ellen, and vice versa.
Despite having little experience with the paranormal, beyond Judy's developing gift
for seeing dead people, these four end up being the only line of defense against a world's
worth of demonic forces once Annabelle starts taking control in the artifact room.
The party kicks off after Daniela is manipulated into opening the case of chapel glass that
contains Annabelle, despite countless locks and warning signs.
But there's a sympathetic motivation behind this destructive act, with Daniela only barging
into the artifact room out of a misguided desire to reconnect with her late father,
whose death in a car accident she feels responsible for.
Out of this desire, she ends up vulnerable to demonic manipulation, opening the doll's
case and forgetting to secure it.
"What else did you touch?"
"Everything."
Similar to the previous Annabelle movies, the ultimate goal of the main demon in charge
is to acquire a soul, and part of attaining this goal apparently involves scaring everybody
into submission with a squad of ghosts and demons, newly awakened thanks to Annabelle's
magic touch.
One of the new entities is the frightening Ferryman, a collector of souls who's purportedly
in charge of shepherding newly-dead people into the great beyond.
His telltale sign is the rattling of coins that he's collected, coins being the currency
by which people reach the afterlife.
In the tradition of ambiguous origin that the movie establishes, the coins are placed
over the eyes of dead people, allowing them to be hauled away to the great beyond.
Unfortunately for these lost souls, the Ferryman also seems to have a tendency to use these
cadavers as props, setting up macabre scenes before bursting into frame for a big jump
scare.
Despite bearing a resemblance to the Weeping Woman of the sixth Conjuring universe movie,
The Curse of La Llorona this movie's white dress entity represents a whole new threat.
The haunted dress influences those who wear it to kill, apparently using one former wearer
as a demonic avatar.
Daniela has a pointed encounter with the bride during the movie's climax, getting the sharp
end of a knife stuck in her gut.
This is a fakeout, promptly revealed to have caused no physical damage, but the reality
of what happens is arguably worse.
The bride vomits gore onto Daniela, and then essentially possesses her.
The next time we see Daniela, she's wearing the dress, and ready to kill.
She's only stopped by the timely deployment of some footage of the Warrens performing
an exorcism.
Apparently, the recording is close enough to the real thing that the entity inside Daniela
can't tell the difference, and the Bride is cast out of her in a cloud of smoke.
Speaking of dark spectral clouds, there's another monster we have to talk about The
Black Shuck, aka the Hellhound, or, as the movie's credits refer to it, simply the werewolf.
If Annabelle Comes Home is the Conjuring universe's answer to an Avengers movie, then this over-the-top
CGI monstrosity is basically the movie's Hulk.
While the other entities seem to have some lore explaining their motivations, this demon
dog appears out of nowhere, seemingly just wanting to kill everybody.
While the movie's monster is based on a real legend in the Black Shuck, this ghostly canine
seems to be taking some influence from another real "case" of the Warrens' — this one involving
their encounter with the Southend Werewolf, which they turned into a "nonfiction" book,
Werewolf: A Demonic Possession.
The endgame kicks in when the kids realize that the only way to stop the madness is to
seal Annabelle back in her case the last thing the demon controlling the doll wants.
The doll is retrieved from its hiding place in the house by Mary Ellen, who braves an
encounter with the Ferryman to get the doll to Judy.
Once Judy gets her hands on Annabelle, she rushes back to the artifact room to re-contain
the evil.
Just as Judy is preparing to seal the doll back into the glass case, she is brutally
attacked by the form of the actual demon who's using Annabelle to hunt down a soul.
The demon immediately begins to steal Judy's soul, only being stopped by a conveniently-placed
crucifix.
But the fight isn't over backing up the lead demon, all of the monstrous entities converge
on the Warrens' artifact room for one final battle.
Judy is then joined by Mary Ellen and a newly-exorcised Daniela, who work together to bat back all
of the monsters and seal Annabelle away.
They barely succeed, and probably wouldn't have survived the night If not for Judy's
aptitude for dealing with the undead.
Empowered by prayer and armed with a cross, the preteen goes beast mode, effectively channeling
her mom's Catholic badassery, looking upon the specters of the dead and saying:
"Not today."
After returning home and hearing the story, the Warrens throw a small party for Judy,
to celebrate both her birthday and the continuing survival of her mortal soul.
Joining the family are Mary Ellen, Bob, and Daniela.
In a surprise twist, Daniela is revealed to have had a stern talk with her Judy-bullying
brother, who led the charge at school in making fun of Judy's paranormal home life.
Thanks to this talk, a whole parade of fellow students also shows up to the party, having
decided as a group to stop bullying the ghost girl.
At this point, it's fair to wonder if the demon is still causing hallucinations, because
that is not how school really works.
The movie wraps up where the chaos all began, back in the Warrens' artifact room.
This time, Lorraine is accompanying Daniela in a one-on-one chat or rather, one-on-one
plus one.
Daniela's earlier attempts to reach her father on the other side were always doomed to be
fruitless without the help of an actual medium, like Lorraine.
On her own, all her pleas to see her dad again only showed the demon a handy weak spot, with
the evil entity using the face of her father to manipulate her.
With Lorraine back in the mix, Daniela is able to easily connect with her darling dad,
who expresses his undying love for her through Lorraine.
It's a well-done way to absolve Daniela of any guilt, both for the part she feels she
played in her dad's death, and her role in unleashing the horrors of the artifact room.
She both learns and grows from her mistake, while also receiving the emotional resolution
she's been looking for.
With the evil contained, Annabelle Comes Home concludes as a rare horror movie with a happy
ending though if we know this series at all, we can bet we'll be seeing some of those new
monsters in their own spin offs one day soon.
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