The Poppies of Terra #64 - Conjuring The Last Rites of Summer

The Conjuring: Last Rites (dir. Michael Chaves), the ninth in the series of interconnected supernatural creepers, and the third helmed by the same director–perhaps in an effort to lend the franchise some tonal cohesion–offers a neat point of demarcation between summer popcorn fare and the season of Halloween tinglers and prestige award hopefuls.

The film itself is a solidly executed franchise entry, with pretty, historically-inflected cinematography and set production, brilliant sound design by Harry Cohen, and a screenplay that delivers on the expected emotional beats without skimping on the scary gotchas. It’s fun to go back to an early case of the Warrens in 1964 and see how it bookends their professional and personal lives. The introduction of the Smurl family is also a nice touch, well wrought. The film benefits from committed performances, with Vera Farmiga in particular a standout of emotional grace and subtlety, and Benjamin Wallfisch doing his usual job of musically elevating the material. Despite its finality-suggesting title, however, the film exists primarily to preserve the status quo of a box-office monster franchise, installing plenty of hatches for future outings even as it seemingly swings the door closed on the main arc of its lead dynamic duo. I had fun with it, specially in a sumptuous IMAX presentation, but make no mistake: it may be titled Last Rites, but it’s really Déjà Boo.

It occurred to me while watching it that part of this series’ effectiveness may derive from the way it normalizes, and thereby confers respect, on paranormal investigators. Anyone who’s been spooked and disbelieved in real life, I suppose, or even mocked or dismissed for other reasons, may find themselves validated by the world of the Warrens, feeling at least vicariously some approval and justness. The Warrens as depicted in the Conjuring-verse are good people, noble souls, helping those in trouble–practically, we might say, doing the Lord’s work. Much of the supernatural machinery of these movies can be conveniently elided, which helps with narrative concision, because they deal in religious tropes. In a way, they’re works of theological exploitation, as well as fictive propaganda for Ed and Lorraine Warren, who have been charged with exaggerations and outright fabrications from prominent skeptics through the decades.

But my goal here isn’t to put the Warrens on trial. Instead, I want to discuss how, more broadly, the championing of the marginalized is cleverly narratively embedded in these movies.

In fact, the technique may be a staple of commercial horror in general.

Here’s the idea: studio horror films may be the only broad-appeal genre that treats the character’s subjective experiences, and the movie’s objective reality, as coequals.

Unlike, say, action, romance, or comedy, as the audience we not only are granted access to a character’s private, subjective world through sharply rendered dreams, hallucinations, fears, and so on, but we’re dramatically immersed in these experiences. Grief, guilt, and trauma–potentially emotions of marginalization–are validated as part of the texture of the real world. Where other genres might present such states as delusion, to be addressed or deconstructed, horror values these ontologies, seeking to inhabit and even celebrate them.

Consider some popular or well-received horror flicks of the last twenty years:

• The Final Destination films (2000–present). These hinge on precognitive visions that appear, at first, to be purely subjective experiences—an anxious teen’s nightmare, a moment of paranoia, a private hallucination. These premonitions are framed as intensely personal states of dread, often dismissed by others as irrational panic. But they turn out to be glimpses into future reality. They’re not false alarms, because even though those specific events may be avoided, death persists objectively in precisely the order it was glimpsed subjectively. Private catastrophes are thereby psychically rendered into public fears.

• The Conjuring movies (2013-present). Time and again we’re immersed in terrors—nightmares, sensations of being touched, visions, etc— that could be dismissed as hysteria but are proven by the Warrens and others to map directly onto realities like haunted houses or possessed dolls.

• Get Out (2017). Chris’ paranoia, unease, and psychological distress are presented through tight framing, sound design, and surreal, literalizing moments, like the memorable “Sunken Place” sequence. Again, these turn out not to be metaphorical embellishments but literal manifestations of hypnosis and body-snatching science. Chris’ subjective disorientation is revealed as inseparable and indistinguishable from the plot’s objectively horrific machinations.

• It Chapter One (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019). The children’s fears—clowns, lepers, headless corpses—are filmed in ways that seem like hallucinations, visible only to the afflicted. But they are triggered by an external, objectively real agent of destruction. Pennywise’s power is to enflesh fear. 

• Smile (2022) and Smile 2 (2024). Dr. Rose Cotter’s breakdown seems rooted in trauma, exhaustion, or mental illness. We’re forced to wonder whether her visions—the smiles, apparitions, and grotesque hallucinations—, only perceived by her, exist in any other sense. Turns out, they do. The entity behind them proves real, and transmissible. Subjective experiences become the objective symptoms of a supernatural parasite. The sequel amps this up, plausibly framing pop star Skye Riley’s struggles with performance anxiety, public scrutiny, and grief as stress-induced psychosis. But as with Rose in the first film, the horrors are real, all part and parcel of the smiling curse’s process of psychological breakdown.

• The First Omen (2024). Much of the film’s power stems from the merging of the protagonist’s sense of paranoia, visions, and religious dread with an external conspiracy and supernatural reality.

There are plenty of other examples. Clearly, blending subjectivity and objectivity isn’t a niche fascination, but a mass-market hook.

It’s also possible to put a twist on this.

Instead of treating subjective experiences as if they were objective, some horror films treat impossible objective events as allegories for subjectivity. They only fire on all cylinders when we accept the “objective” events onscreen as externalizations of interior states or metaphorical explorations of certain themes.

One I’m partial to, mother! (2017), clearly falls into this latter category.

The micro-budget breakout hit Skinamarink (2022), composited from real reported nightmares, follows no conventional narrative structure whatsoever.

And two of my favorite films of 2025 so far, both of them horror, also inhabit this sneaky realm:  Best Wishes to All (dir. Yûta Shimotsu) and Hallow Road (dir. Babak Anvari) can, theoretically, be taken on their own terms, but only truly come alive as fabulation.

Instead of saying “the subjective is real,” these nightmares whisper “the real is allegorical.” 

Commercial horror appears to thrive in the first mode, which makes sense–box office appeal hinges on scares feeling like something that could happen to anyone. Arthouse and festival horror, on the other hand, often lean into the second, demanding that the impossible be read symbolically, and in that way requiring more from the audience.

Whatever direction we follow the logic in, the result is the same: our pain, our suffering, is an essential component of external reality. Horror collapses the boundaries between in- and out-side. As Linda Styles says In the Mouth of Madness: “A reality is just what we tell each other it is.” By embracing this idea, horror speaks truth.