"We had been respectable, ordinary people until the comet"
December 4, 2024 8:27 PM Subscribe
Carmen Maria Machado (LitHub and also Conjunctions, 12/04/2024), "Endlings": "Lorraine patted my mother's arm and assured her that she believed her. The comet had been rustling up quite a lot of supernatural activity where you least expected it." Related: Kim Masters, Ashley Cullins (THR, 12/13/2017), "War Over 'The Conjuring': The Disturbing Claims Behind a Billion-Dollar Franchise" and movies based on cases of Ed and Lorraine Warren, e.g. on Fanfare: Annabelle; The Conjuring; The Amityville Horror; The Conjuring 2; and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Also, personal ghost stories by other contributors to Conjunctions. And La Llorona (1960), a classic ghost story relevant to "Endlings" and in this version reviewed on Cinema Cats. CW: children are harmed in La Llorona stories and in the nonfiction article about The Conjuring.
This is a fantastic post, Wobbuffet. It's right up my alley, but beyond that, I love the way you blended links of all sorts, spiraling out from a central starting point. If we still did annual awards for quality posts, I'd 100% support this. Hell, I'd be happy to see this on the damn banner for the month of December, with text reading "this is how you do it."
It's nice to see the Warrens discussed here in this context. In horror land, people sometimes spend so much time finding novel sneers for them (which I don't disagree with, but), it shrinks the discussion down to chest-beating and little else. The rise of a $2bn+ movie franchise around people who were shameless grifters, preying on the vulnerable in living memory should itself have spawned a movie franchise.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:19 AM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]
It's nice to see the Warrens discussed here in this context. In horror land, people sometimes spend so much time finding novel sneers for them (which I don't disagree with, but), it shrinks the discussion down to chest-beating and little else. The rise of a $2bn+ movie franchise around people who were shameless grifters, preying on the vulnerable in living memory should itself have spawned a movie franchise.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:19 AM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]
Oh, looking forward to reading this. I've only read one piece by Machado, her memoir, "In the Dream House" and that was like wandering through someone's dreamscape buoyed by lyrical prose.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:26 AM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by rmd1023 at 6:26 AM on December 5, 2024 [1 favorite]
This was much worse than I knew. I was mainly aware of some of the skeptical literature about the events depicted in the original Conjuring movie:
The Conjuring: Ghosts? Poltergeists? Demons?
The Conjuring & Perron story, The current owner speaks out (an hour video by Norma Sutcliffe, a woman who owned the Conjuring house at the time the movie came out & her headaches about dealing with that)
The Real Bathsheba Sherman: The True History vs. "Conjured' Fiction (the real life Bathsheba Sherman was neither a witch nor a baby murderer nor a suicide, but was given a Christian burial in consecrated ground)
The real life Bathsheba Sherman has had her grave desecrated as a result of the false depiction of her as a witch in the first Conjuring movie, but that seems very small compared to what I just learned about the Warrens.
posted by jonp72 at 7:30 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]
The Conjuring: Ghosts? Poltergeists? Demons?
The Conjuring & Perron story, The current owner speaks out (an hour video by Norma Sutcliffe, a woman who owned the Conjuring house at the time the movie came out & her headaches about dealing with that)
The Real Bathsheba Sherman: The True History vs. "Conjured' Fiction (the real life Bathsheba Sherman was neither a witch nor a baby murderer nor a suicide, but was given a Christian burial in consecrated ground)
The real life Bathsheba Sherman has had her grave desecrated as a result of the false depiction of her as a witch in the first Conjuring movie, but that seems very small compared to what I just learned about the Warrens.
posted by jonp72 at 7:30 PM on December 5, 2024 [2 favorites]
jonp72, your second link goes to the same article as the first. Did you mean this one?
It pleases me that Machado's excellent story distorts some of the facts of the Warrens' lives, just as the Warrens did to others. It seems like a kind of poetic justice. I wish the CSA was a distortion rather than something that was probably true. It does make Lorraine Warren's insistence on not allowing the movies to depict sex or sex with children make a lot more sense.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:55 PM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]
It pleases me that Machado's excellent story distorts some of the facts of the Warrens' lives, just as the Warrens did to others. It seems like a kind of poetic justice. I wish the CSA was a distortion rather than something that was probably true. It does make Lorraine Warren's insistence on not allowing the movies to depict sex or sex with children make a lot more sense.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:55 PM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]
Mod note: [Another weird and winding, fascinating post, Wobbuffet, thank you! We've added it to the sidebar and Best Of blog roundup of recent great posts!]
posted by taz (staff) at 2:24 AM on December 8, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by taz (staff) at 2:24 AM on December 8, 2024 [1 favorite]
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that said, this line made me laugh out loud: Having not yet gained enough fame as a self-trained demonologist to pay the bills in the early 1960s, Ed was working as a city bus driver in Monroe, Connecticut.
posted by chavenet at 4:15 AM on December 5, 2024 [3 favorites]