When last we saw Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Verga Farmiga) they were tangling with the evil Annabelle in 2019’s Annabelle Comes Home. But now they’re back for eighth entry in The Conjuring franchise, The Devil Made Me Do It.
Once again directed by Michael Chaves, the film follows the murder trial of Arne Johnson, played here by Irish actor Ruairi O’Connor. One of the real-life Warrens most controversial cases and easily the darkest of the series to-date.
Chaves puts this new darkness down to a motivation to step away from the haunted house setup of earlier films in the franchise. Speaking with IGN the direct says “One of the things that [series creator] James [Wan] and I connected on while making The Curse of La Llorona was sharing a lot of the same favourite movies, and one of them is Se7en. We both love that movie, and so when he came to me with this script, he basically was like, ‘It’s Se7en, but in the Conjuring universe.’ And he knew that was like catnip for me.”
Another way in which The Devil Made Me Do It will stand alone from other movies in the Warner Bros. franchise is by stepping away from the trope of setting up standalone movies for its supernatural villains.
“What’s gonna be our iconic scary monster, what’s gonna be our Annabelle or our Nun?” says Chaves. “And from the very beginning, James and the studio wanted to do something very different, basically treat this as a new decade for the Warrens, a new chapter where we’re introducing new themes, new ideas, and taking these characters to places that they’ve never gone before. Let me just say their adversary is unlike any adversary they’ve faced before, and not just in the sense that it’s another iconic character. There’s something fundamentally different with this one and I think that’s honestly what I’m most excited about.”
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It premieres on HBO Max and in theaters on June 4, 2021. Head over to IGN to check out the first look stills.
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