The Conjuring 2 -2016 Page

Unlike the first film’s Rhode Island haunting, shifts the action across the Atlantic to the London borough of Enfield. The film is based on the famous (and controversial) "Enfield Poltergeist" case of 1977.

At its core, The Conjuring 2 is a film preoccupied with two distinct but intersecting forms of trauma. The first is the overt, supernatural trauma afflicting the Hodgson family, particularly young Janet. The second, more nuanced, is the lingering psychological wound carried by Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga). The film opens not in Enfield, but with the Warrens’ final confrontation with the demonic nun Valak during the Amityville case. This prologue is crucial: it establishes that Lorraine’s clairvoyant gift is also a curse. She sees not just ghosts but the shape of future suffering—a premonition of Ed’s death. Wan cleverly uses this trauma to explain why the Warrens hesitate to involve themselves in the Enfield Poltergeist case. Lorraine is not merely afraid of a demon; she is afraid of what believing in her vision might do to her family. Thus, the film’s central tension is not simply “will they exorcise the ghost?” but “will Lorraine reconstitute her fractured psyche to save a child she does not know?” The poltergeist in Enfield becomes a mirror for the poltergeist within Lorraine’s own mind. The Conjuring 2 -2016

Wan’s masterstroke is his use of spatial geometry to externalize these internal states. Unlike the sprawling, creaking farmhouse of the first film, the Hodgson home in Enfield is a cramped, unglamorous row house. Every room bleeds into the next. The infamous living room is dominated by a heavy armchair that becomes a throne for the possessed Janet; the narrow hallway is a shooting gallery for ghostly apparitions; the children’s bedroom, with its bunk beds and toy tent, is a layered space where the supernatural can hide in plain sight. Wan and cinematographer Don Burgess frame these spaces with a relentless sense of confinement. The camera pans slowly, revealing corners that should be safe but aren’t. The film’s most terrifying sequence—Janet’s levitation and the slow descent of the “crooked man” from a child’s toy—relies entirely on the violation of domestic scale. The hallway becomes impossibly long, the ceiling impossibly high, as if the house itself is breathing and expanding to swallow its occupants. This is not the gothic sublime; it is the horror of the too familiar turned strange. Unlike the first film’s Rhode Island haunting, shifts