How Annabelle Comes Home could inspire more Conjuring universe spin-off films
Director James Wan‘s 2013 supernatural horror tale The Conjuring birthed 2014’s Annabelle while 2016’s The Conjuring 2 begat last year’s spooky blockbuster The Nun. So, don’t be surprised if the upcoming horror threequel Annabelle Comes Home (out June 28) itself inspires a Conjuring universe spin-off, especially given the movie’s frighteningly fertile premise.
Written and directed by Gary Dauberman, Annabelle Comes Home finds the titular evil doll stirring up trouble after being placed in a room full of similarly disturbing objects at the house of supernatural investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
“This film starts right after the prologue of the first Conjuring,” says producer Peter Safran. “Ed and Lorraine, they bring Annabelle home, they put her in her case. The reason they had to put her in kind of a sanctified case is because she is a beacon for other spirits. We cut to a year later, and she ends up activating a lot of the artifacts that are in the artifact room. It all takes place over the course of one night, involving their daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace), her babysitter (Madison Iseman), and the babysitter’s best friend (Katie Sarife).”
Could one or more of those artifacts wind up as the subject of their own movie? That’s the hope, according to Safran — just don’t ask him which, at this point.
“I think we always knew, basically from the first Conjuring, that the artifact room was going to be a treasure trove for us of stories eventually,” says Safran. “It seemed like the most natural way to do it was to tell the story of the most famous member of the artifact room, which is Annabelle, to have her be the catalyst for it. Once we came up with that concept, Gary, James, myself, the studio, everybody just immediately latched onto it as a great way to create some other artifacts that ultimately could have their own life afterwards. As we discovered in Conjuring 2, you never quite know which [has] the spin-off potential. We really, at the time, felt that Crooked Man was going to be the one — and it still might be — but it just turned out that the audience had such a fascination with the Nun, that we felt that was the origin story we had to tell.”
Watch the trailer for Annabelle Comes Home, above.
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