Maybe you’re anticipating it too.Annabelle Comes Home, I mean.My latest book, Nightmares with the Bible, has a chapter on The Conjuring universe, and with the recent death of Lorraine Warren I’ve been working on another piece trying to fit this whole puzzle together.“What puzzle?” did I hear you ask?The puzzle, I answer, between what really happened in the Ed and Lorraine Warren investigations.You see, the paranormal is one of those things we’ve been taught to laugh at, and we’re told that people who “see things” are dweebish kinds of gnomes that don’t see the light of the sun enough.Reality television has brought some of these ideas into vogue, what with ordinary people gathering “scientific” evidence of ghosts and the rest of us scratch our heads while hoaxes are revealed on the B reel.But still, Annabelle lives.
It has also been announced that The Conjuring 3 is in development.For some of us—and I’m well aware that movie-making is an industry and that profit is its goal—the question of what’s real can be as haunting as any ghost.You see, I buy into the scientific method, as far as it goes.That caveat is necessary, however, since science is neither able to nor interested in assessing all the strange things people see.Our senses can be fooled, and a great many people haven’t developed the critical ability to scrutinize their own observations skeptically.Skepticism itself, however, need not become orthodoxy.It’s like any other tool in our mental box—each has its own purpose.A car engine is dismantled in order to rebuild it in working order.And there may be a ghost in the machine.
That’s what gets me about this whole Conjuring thing, and beyond that the contested livelihood of the Warrens.There may be such a thing as mass hysteria (the current state of the US government can hardly be explained any other way), but the Perron haunting that was the subject of the first film provides, I think, a good test case.A family of seven living in a house where they experienced things not only collectively and individually but also in different combinations would seem to be a place where multiple angles could be used.According to Andrea Perron’s written account, the Warrens’ investigation never really took off there.That didn’t prevent a very successful movie franchise from being launched, loosely based on their story.And getting at the truth is never as simple as buying your ticket online and waiting for the show to begin.
