Sometimes you just need a bunch of spooky stuff to happen.
Even at its most exciting, "expanded universe" storytelling eventually becomes homework. This isn't inherently a problem – there's a certain thrill in watching the ripple effects of a narrative or a character spread across multiple series and worlds. But at a certain point, you hit "Do I HAVE to watch this?" critical mass. And from there, it's blockbuster Jenga. Skip the wrong part and the whole thing comes down. And thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe changing the way Hollywood wanted to build franchises over the past 15+ years, we've seen quite a few projects fall.
Which is why the best "expanded universe" efforts are the ones that haven't been so dedicated to their own puzzle. For instance, The Conjuring Universe, which began in 2013 with The Conjuring and brings 'Phase One' to a close this year with the ninth film in its saga, The Conjuring: Last Rites, uses the expanded universe formula as a way to switch in and out between various pieces of horror iconography. Horror, with its tried-and-true resistance to pesky, fear-killing exposition, might be the least obvious choice for a stellar crossover, but history has shown us that it's often the most refreshing one.
Origin of evil
Back in the 1940s, Universal Pictures was riding high on its second wave of horror series. Now, to be fair, these films were often treated like "B movies," as they often served as cash-in sequels to the game-changing efforts of the early 1930s, like Dracula and Frankenstein. But bearing a cavalcade of gothic creatures eventually led Universal to try and create its own "monster mash," with the first installment being 1943's Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman. The reason for the resurrected corpse to face the lycanthrope was threadbare – The Wolfman seeks a cure for his condition, hears about Dr. Frankenstein's skills, and runs into the Monster. They end up fighting by the end and get washed away in a flood.
This formula would be repeated throughout further entries like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula: a man (or monster) just sort of runs into other characters, and they either team up, betray each other, or fight until they're inevitably burned or drowned. And while they sound absurd, they're also a blast as they take any excuse possible to get their monsters within clawing or strangling range of one another. It's not too far from what the horror-adjacent MonsterVerse is currently doing with their team-ups between Godzilla and Kong. Yes, some scientist might spend a minute explaining the "ecosystem" of "Titans" that forces them to clash, but in the end, it's just a way to dump the action figures out on the floor.
No homework
The Conjuring Universe may include significantly fewer Dracula beatdowns, but its system for wrangling in new series feels just as effortless. The main Conjuring films are loosely based on the alleged investigations of real-life paranormal researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren. How much of the "truth" of their lives that these films choose to include is certainly up for debate, but they use the stories as a launch pad for both familiar jump-scare patterns and truly inspired haunting set-ups. And the films often include specters and ghouls that get treated to spinoffs of their own.
How to watch The Conjuring movies in order (release and chronological)
But do you need to watch The Conjuring before you watch Annabelle, or view The Conjuring 2 before you see The Nun? No. These new series are based around the same "toy box" logic as Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman – just put 'em somewhere else and set these familiar horror archetypes loose. When the Warren family does show up outside of The Conjuring films, like in Annabelle Comes Home or The Nun II, it's never in a way that would threaten the story's stability had they not appeared. They're there as familiar faces, like Universal's array of mad doctors in the monster group sessions. They remind you, "Oh, yeah. This is sort of their thing."
The "expanded universe" approach to horror doesn't have a perfect success rate – The 2017 Mummy film, which placed Tom Cruise at the center of a world filled with a powerful Egyptian princess, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and nods to many more monsters, reeked of desperation. The Conjuring, however, relishes its simplicity to the extent that you'd be forgiven if you went to see Annabelle: Creation or The Nun without knowing their ties to The Conjuring films. Sometimes an "expanded universe" can just be a place where spooky stuff keeps happening.
Not going down without a fright
Despite the fact that it's been extremely successful and that even the worst of its films are watchable, The Conjuring Universe provides few lessons to the horror genre as a whole. Horror thrives on not-knowing and the creeping atmosphere that fully envelops you before you're allowed the comfort of knowledge. Expanded universes, on the other hand, are typically built around knowing and the taking of characters and plotlines that you learned about to create the foundation of the next installment. In other hands, there's a chance that The Conjuring Universe could've been an unbearable line of supernatural explanations.
Instead, it, like the later classic Universal monster films and the current MonsterVerse, manages to walk the line between thrills and familiarity. It didn't all pan out smoothly – the scariest sequence in The Conjuring 2 (and maybe the whole franchise) involves a character called The Crooked Man, and its spinoff was eventually cancelled. But it's for the best that it remains an exception, and there's no need to overdo it. Perhaps, years from now, we can try again to see what happens when ghosts, haunted dolls and demons all happen to be neighbors.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is in theaters now. For more, read our The Conjuring: Last Rites review.
