"In the pantheon of horror-movie baddies, it's hard to think of any figure more overhyped than Annabelle, the haunted doll who has found her way into all nine Conjuring universe installments (not to mention an Aquaman movie). When I say "Annabelle is a flop," I'm being literal: Her special trick is falling over - sometimes straight ahead, sometimes to the side. On her best days, she can turn her head and make rocking chairs rock, neither of which is anything to brag about."
"Yes, theoretically, Annabelle is capable of movement, in that she frequently appears in (and disappears from) surprising places. But watch any of the Annabelle movies and you'll marvel at how much credit she gets for sitting. Her dreadful self-titled 2014 film explores the backstory of how the doll came to be tethered to the demon Malthus, as seen in the first Conjuring."
Annabelle is depicted as an overhyped, largely inert horror figure whose main effects are falling over, turning her head and occasionally making rocking chairs rock. Her films emphasize backstory and other active antagonists, with demons and possessed humans doing the primary damage. The doll's mythology ties her to a demon named Malthus, but the franchise often uses preexisting hauntings to terrorize families. Annabelle's spinoffs frequently release more proactive ghosts to do the heavy lifting. The Conjuring universe consistently depends on external forces to execute the scares, effectively outsourcing the horror.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]