James Wan, director or the first and second Conjuring films, recently sat down with IGN to discuss ideas for The Conjuring 3, and he revealed that he does have a specific concept in mind. Hint: the new concept may be more phantasmical than what The Conjuring fans are used to.
Luckily for Wan, the Conjuring films are based on a series of true stories: the case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, two experts of paranormal activity who operated as a team during the 1970s and 80s. That fact helps a lot in narrowing down the ideas for The Conjuring 3 because there is only so much to choose from.
“They do have a lot of stories so I think, organically, if we’re lucky enough to tell future chapters, there’s a lot of stuff we could be pulling from,” said Wan.
Wan told Cinema Blend that what with the massive success of The Conjuring 2, which was released less than a month ago but already looks to be a classic horror flick, ideas have been flying around as to which of the case files the next Conjuring installment might tackle.
“They have a lot of cases. I’m not sitting there sifting through every single one, but I think, you know, between the writers and the studio, I think they have a short list of their favorite, like basically the top 20 or 30 of the Warren’s favorite cases.”
Of course, the opinion that matters most when it comes to the premise of The Conjuring 3 is that of Wan himself, and he tells IGN he has narrowed it down considerably more than the rest of the production team. In fact, Wan says, he has one specific case in mind.
“I do have something specific but I’m not going to say it. But I will say this – I do think Conjuring 1 and 2 are both set in the 70s, I think Conjuring 3 has got to be set in the 80s,” Wan teased.
The time period the third Conjuring installment will focus on may not tell you much about the movie’s plot (other than the fact that Patrick Wilson might shed his sideburns in the next flick), but something that Wan said in the Cinema Blend interview certainly does.
“Maybe we can go and do it like a classic American Werewolf in London style. That would be awesome! The Warrens set against the backdrop of The Hound of Baskerville.”
Wan wants to do something set in the 1980s, he wants to lean more towards a creature feature, and, wouldn’t you know it, Ed and Lorraine Warren actually took on a case in 1983 in which a London man was supposedly possessed by a demon and made to act like a werewolf.
The things James wan has said about the Conjuring 3 plot in the past and this actual story from the Warrens’ case files seem to line up too well to not be the “something specific” Wan mentioned in the IGN piece.
Even his proposed location – London – lines up. The cliched nature of the British set pieces was one of the few common criticisms of The Conjuring 2 and some more research into the matter would likely need to be done this time around, but many critics also thought that the English setting was also fresh and original, adding a bit of gravitas to the film.
The first Conjuring film focused on a haunting that occurred in a Rhode Island household in 1970, and The Conjuring 2 is based on paranormal activity that dogged a family living in Enfield, a suburb of London, in 1977. Both were great stories that lent themselves well to the screen, but they both followed the path of a traditional demonic possession-exorcism film in terms of the types of spooky activity displayed.
It sounds like James Wan, who has in the past directed such creative horror fare as Saw, Dead Silence, and Fast & Furious 7, intends to break that mold with The Conjuring 3.
[Photo by Valerie Macon/Getty Images]