The team behind The Conjuring franchise is finally revealing the goods on the final movie in the Ed and Lorraine Warren saga, The Conjuring: Last Rites. And, surprisingly, Taissa Farmiga is not a part of it.
We say “surprisingly” because the post-credits scene attached to the last entry, 2023’s Farmiga-led The Nun II, connected to the events of the main movies by bringing in Patrick Wilson’s demonologist Ed Warren and Vera Farmiga’s clairvoyant Lorraine Warren. Many speculated that perhaps it was all leading to real-life sisters Taissa and Vera sharing the screen for the first time as their characters.
That won’t be the case in The Conjuring: Last Rites. Taissa’s Sister Irene is not in the movie, director Michael Chaves confirms to Entertainment Weekly for our latest cover story on the franchise finale. “I was really craving more of a connection, to be totally honest, between The Nun and the Warrens,” the filmmaker says. “It starts to actually get into some tricky legal territory because all these stories are based on true stories.”
That may sound farfetched from the folks who regularly bring demonic possessions and other otherworldly phenomena to life. However, these films are largely based on the cases of the real paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. As Chaves explains, bringing in Sister Irene more directly to Lorraine’s story would then mean firmly establishing a familial relationship between them — but that would mean taking liberties with Lorraine’s history.
“It was something where, even if it’s a fictionalized relationship,” he says, “everyone just liked the idea of keeping the core Conjuring stories as much true stories as possible.”
In other words, “If you lean too much into this epic Game of Thrones family connection, then it starts to diminish it a little bit,” Chaves adds. “It starts to pull away at the authenticity of the main storyline, which is where we all netted out.”
So they went the implied root. The Nun (2018) first introduced Taissa as Sister Irene, a nun in her novitiate who travels to 1950s Romania on assignment from the Vatican and discovers the demon Valak, first introduced in The Conjuring 2 (2016), as the culprit behind the deaths of two holy women from the local monastery. The connection between the spinoff and the main Conjuring films became more apparent in The Nun II, which revealed Sister Irene is a descendant of Saint Lucy. She then has a vision of other descendants, including Vera’s Lorraine Warren, which heavily implies a familial tie.
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“It’s not directly clear in The Nun, but there is this implication they come from a line of saints,” Chaves says, “so that idea could be continued. There are little threads to that.”
Peter Safran, a longtime executive producer on the franchise, confirms a Farmiga family team-up “was certainly discussed over the years,” but he also notes their long-laid plans to focus on the Smurl family haunting in the final Conjuring film. That is now The Conjuring: Last Rites, which is set in 1986, more than 20 years after the main events of The Nun II.
“It didn’t really make sense from that perspective,” Safran says. “We’ve always been good about not shoehorning elements in just for the hell of it. There has to be a rationale and a reason and a story motive behind everything that we’re doing.”
The Conjuring: Last Rites hits theaters on Sept. 5.
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