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The Conjuring (Wan 2013)
James Wan sawed his way into the horror with Saw (Wan 2004) and a subsequent string of commercial successes and fan favorites. Driven by the desire to return to some good old fashioned horrifying movies, we started with Saw. This begins a mini-series of episodes dedicated to James Wan’t films and morphed quickly into focusing on possession, demon, and haunting films more broadly. Expertly constructed, super scary, but don’t be fooled, it is surprisingly ideologically conservative.
SPOILERS IN THIS EPISODE
The Conjuring (Wan 2013) – please watch the film before listening!
The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973)
TOPIC INDEX – (Wan 2013) (times are approximate)
0:35 – Introductions
4:30 – Discussion begins
6:15 – the ideological trainwreck begins with Annabelle’s origin story
10:30 – the film is scary and remarkably well made
13:10 – the ideological trainwreck continues
18:00 – gender
20:00 – character census
25:30 – irrationality and xenophobia
33:30 – who are we in the us vs them and Marshall was mystified
38:00 – empiricism and xenophobia
41:45 – aligning ideological binaries
47:00 – pro-religion but anti the catholic church?
52:30 – the film is well constructed
54:00 – Laura’s master argument
1:04:45 – A deep dive into the writer’s and producers
1:09:00 – patriarchy in exorcism films
1:12:00 – myth construction and distributed fear
1:23:00 – Grading the film using the Collective Nightmares Evolving Rubric of Social Responsibility
Related Episodes
It Comes at Night (Shults 2017)
Martyrs (2008)
Rob Zombie’s Halloween (Zombie 2006)
Credits
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• IG: @collectivenightmares
• T: @collectnight
• Marshall@collectivenightmares.com
• Laura@collectivenightmares.com
“Horror films are our collective nightmares.”
Episode 80
Keywords
horror, podcast, sociology, marriage, divorce, parenting, blame, marriage as institution, gender, sexism, kids, trauma, gaslighting, medication, mental illness, ideological train-wreck, conservative, Foucault, Foucauldian horror, xenophobia, us vs them, religion, Christianity, misogyny, ecofeminism, no racial diversity, motherhood, infanticide, witches, Salem,