As the Conjuring franchise winds down with this year’s Last Rites, James Wan, one of the chief architects of this horror-verse, is looking back on one spinoff that never happened.
In the making of The Conjuring 2 (2016), the director and his longtime collaborator, producer Peter Safran, had high hopes for the Crooked Man, a Slender Man-esque entity that appears to spook the young Billy (Benjamin Haigh) and later Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson).
“We thought the Crooked Man was basically going to be the Annabelle for Conjuring 2…but when the audience saw the movie, they wanted to know more about the nun. That’s what they gravitated towards,” Safran says during an interview for Entertainment Weekly‘s The Conjuring: Last Rites cover story. “So you got to listen to your fans, you got to listen to the audience.”
Wan seems to have some glint of hope for Crooked Man, though no plans are currently in place to explore that character more on screen. “I still have a movie in my head that I would hopefully love to get off the ground one day, but we’ll see,” he says in a separate conversation. “I get fans that reach out to me every now and then, begging us to make a Crooked Man movie. Just as a fan, I would love to do it one day, if I can convince the studio to do so.”
Instead of the Crooked Man, Wan and Safran made the Bonnie Aarons-portrayed demon nun, an unholy form of the demon Valak, the star of her own movies. The character was a later addition to The Conjuring 2, which made the positive audience reactions all the more surprising to the creators.
“There was a demon presence and it just wasn’t satisfying us or the audience,” Safran recalls. “So in a one-day reshoot against blue screen, James shot Bonnie Aarons doing a whole bunch of different things that we then inserted into the movie.”
The Nun first released in 2018, with Taissa Farmiga starring as Sister Irene, a nun in her novitiate who’s called to Romania to assist in an investigation around the deaths of Valak’s latest victims. Both Sister Irene and the entity returned for The Nun II in 2023.
Safran recalls another character that went the way of the Crooked Man, i.e. an entity they thought had spinoff potential but were proven otherwise through test screenings. Davis Osborne portrayed “the Beast,” who appears within a waterbed in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.
“We ended up cutting that character out and replacing it with something else throughout all of its sequences,” Safran says. “It was a more human character before, and it wasn’t working.”
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“Listen, audiences don’t care about your feelings,” Safran adds. “They will just tell you what they like or what they don’t like.”
Wan and Safran are now wrapping up the main story of The Conjuring with The Conjuring: Last Rites (in theaters Sept. 5), directed by Michael Chaves. In EW’s exclusive first look at the final chapter, Ed and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) are called on to investigate the Smurl family haunting in the year 1986. The film will heavily involve Judy Warren (Mia Tomlinson), who’s now in her 20s and dating her future husband, Tony Spera (Ben Hardy).
Learn more about Last Rites in EW’s cover story.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
