Or call it what the movie very explicitly calls it: The Devil. Call it a collective delusion, or a desperate cry for attention from a disturbed child. And as malevolent spirits often do, it picked on one of the children in particular, 11-year-old Janet Hodgson (Madison Wolfe). The main plot of the film revolves around a real-life incident known as the Enfield Poltergeist, an extremely well-documented case of a supposed ghost who terrorized the Hodgson family of North London from 1977 to 1979 and was apparently a fan of the classics: knocking on walls, shaking beds, throwing furniture, and even the occasional haunted kid's toy. Speaking of tropes, that's where the "based on a true story" bit comes in. On a lizard-brain level, The Conjuring 2 taps into the universal childhood fear of the dark, and some of its simplest moments-like a little girl hiding under the covers with a flashlight-are its most effective, bolstered by skillfully executed sound design and Don Burgess' gloomy cinematography. First, the all-important question: Is The Conjuring 2 scary? Like, jump out of your seat, watch through your outstretched fingers scary? The answer to that is "yes." Under James Wan's direction, even the most clichéd haunted-house tropes (and this movie is bursting with them) are genuinely creepy, and although the movie isn't overly reliant on jump scares, the ones it does use-well, they work.
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