“You don’t know the real story,” the poster for Annabelle: Creation promises. The film mostly delivers on that. As a prequel to 2014’s Annabelle and the fourth entry in The Conjuring Universe, it does the one job a franchise prequel needs to do: it makes the doll scary again by explaining where she came from.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
A Dollmaker, a Nun, and Six Orphans
The setup is simple and grim. Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia) is a dollmaker. He and his wife Esther (Miranda Otto) lose their seven-year-old daughter Annabelle, nicknamed “Bee,” when she steps in front of a car. Twelve years later, the grieving couple opens their home to Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman) and six girls left homeless by the closing of their orphanage.
The house is large, dusty and full of locked doors. The girls are warned to stay away from Bee’s bedroom. This being a horror film, that warning lasts about as long as you would expect.
Janice Finds the Key
Janice (Talitha Eliana Bateman) is a young orphan disabled by polio. She finds a note reading “Find me” and sneaks into Bee’s room, which has mysteriously become unlocked. Inside, she finds a key to Bee’s closet. Inside the closet is the porcelain doll.
That act releases a demon, and the film’s second half is the demon working through the house, one girl at a time. Sandberg, who directed Lights Out, keeps the scares physical and mean. The best sequence arrives early: the demon takes Bee’s form, appears to Janice, and says it wants her soul. Janice tries to escape on a stairlift. The demon recalls the stairlift and hurls her down to the ground floor.
The fall leaves Janice severely injured and in a wheelchair. That injury matters. It confines her to the first floor, isolates her from Linda (Lulu Wilson), her best friend, and sets up the film’s most upsetting turn.
The Possession of Janice
The demon poses as Sister Charlotte and wheels Janice into the old barn. There, in Bee’s form, it attacks and possesses her. Linda notices the change in Janice’s behavior and tells Samuel that Janice went into Bee’s room and found the doll. Samuel believes her immediately.
What follows is the film’s hardest scene. Janice, now able to walk, transforms and kills Samuel. He follows her holding a crucifix. She breaks his fingers and forces him to drop it. Sister Charlotte hears his screams and finds him dead outside.
The cast around the girls does solid work. LaPaglia has described his character as “a mysterious, quiet-yet-gruff man who is mourning both the loss of his daughter and the medical degeneration of his wife. The young orphans who move into the now-dilapidated house fear him.” That reading is exactly what the film shows. He kept his distance from the young actresses on set to stay in character, and the coldness reads on screen.
The production history explains some of the film’s strengths:
- Gary Dauberman returned to write the script after the 2014 Annabelle.
- David F. Sandberg replaced John R. Leonetti as director.
- Peter Safran and James Wan returned as producers.
- Principal photography ran from June 27 to August 15, 2016, in Los Angeles.
- The film premiered at the LA Film Festival on June 19, 2017, and opened in the United States on August 11, 2017.
What the Young Cast Brings
The child performances carry the middle stretch, and the casting was deliberate. Bateman, Wilson and Samara Lee, who plays Bee, had all seen The Exorcist. Lee was named after Samara Morgan from The Ring. None of them were disturbed by the material, though some said the doll itself unsettled them. Sandberg has said the only real challenge with them was hour restrictions on set, since they could not work after midnight or put in overtime.
Wilson auditioned for Linda because she wanted to play a horror protagonist after playing an antagonist in Ouija: Origin of Evil. Creation was her third horror film, after Deliver Us from Evil and Ouija. Bateman had been considered by James Wan for the role of Janet in The Conjuring 2, a part that went to Madison Wolfe. Her brother, Gabriel Bateman, starred in Sandberg’s Lights Out.
The film also plants a piece of franchise furniture. Bonnie Aarons reprises her role from The Conjuring 2 as the demon nun Valak, uncredited. Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton appear in archive footage from Annabelle as Mia and John Form.
Where It Stands in the Conjuring Universe
Annabelle: Creation is the rare prequel that improves the thing it precedes. The 2014 Annabelle was a thin exercise built around a doll that mostly sat still. This film gives the doll a history, a house and a reason to be feared, and it does so with a cleaner structure than most franchise filler.
It is not a great horror film. The back half leans on jump scares and the demon’s rules stay vague. The barn possession is brutal but rushed, and the film never quite explains why the demon needs Janice specifically beyond the convenience of the plot. The Mullins’ grief is the engine of the first act and gets dropped once the killing starts.
What holds it together is Sandberg’s control of space. The house has a geography the audience learns: the stairs, the stairlift, the locked room, the barn, the well. When the demon uses that geography against Janice, the scare lands because we know exactly where she is and how trapped she is. That is craft, and it is why this entry outlasts its predecessor.
The film grossed $307 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews from critics. A sequel, Annabelle Comes Home, followed on June 26, 2019. The franchise has kept going, but Creation remains the installment that did the actual work of building the mythology rather than just cashing in on it.
The real story, it turns out, was worth telling.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
