Insidious: Chapter 2

There are some decent scares in this one. There is also some humor, although I am not sure all of it was intentional.

The Lambert family, with their oldest son now back awake, are still plagued by the demon that has haunted them in part one. It becomes pretty clear, that it has latched itself (himself) onto the father of the family. Again, that is.

The details of how he was possessed as a child are filled in via flashbacks throughout the film and ultimately also reveal the identity of the ghost/demon/person that took over his body. This happened when he was a boy first and then later his son...because the person taking over their bodies was himself robbed of his boyhood, because his crazy mother raised him as a girl (and then later made him kill women).

There are some clever overlaps with the first film, as well.

6/10

The Conjuring

I have seen a lot of horror films. A lot. This is the best horror film I have seen in a long time, if not ever.

The film details the allegedly true story about a haunting in the house of the Perron family and is based on the findings of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Whether or not you buy into the paranormal depicted or, indeed, believe that such phenomena exist, the film will have you jump more than once.

It is old school horror rather than buckets of blood poured onto everyone and everything (something I am absolutely cool with in films, but find it less effective than haunting story telling). The build-up is slow paced but when the weird things start happening, they happen in spades. And it is scary. For me, it's the small things that do it, like in Paranormal Activity (the first one aka the only one that matters) the door that moved in the middle of the night, here it was hands reaching out from between clothes and clapping.

If you want to have side-to-side comparisons of the fictional vs. real people, there is an article with photos and all about it on the History vs. Hollywood website. There is also a pretty official webpage for the film.

Very, very scary and very, very good. James Wan knows what he is doing.

9/10