[COLUMN] The Masculine Anxieties of The Conjuring: Last Rites | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Conjuring: Last Rites. And also Avengers: Endgame. If you’re still worried about that.

The Conjuring: Last Rites begins with an absent father.

It opens with a flashback to the first case undertaken by paranormal experts Ed (Orion Smith) and Lorraine Warren (Madison Lawlor). The pair have been summoned by a young woman, whose father saw something in the reflection of an old mirror in their antique shop, and went on to take his own life. His body hangs from the ceiling. This is not the only father in Last Rites to meet a similar end. Catholic Priest, Father Gordon (Steve Coulter), takes his own life after a similar encounter.

The Conjuring franchise is a fascinating object. There is a plausible argument to be made that it is the second most successful shared universe in modern Hollywood. One of the more interesting aspects of these films is the way that they take the big, populist blockbuster horrors of the 1970s – The Exorcist and The Omen are huge touchstones – and filter them through the lens of modern franchise fare. They are the rare horror franchise to feature semi-regular car chases.

That franchise brain is hard at work in Last Rites. The film ends with the wedding of the Warrens’ daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), to her boyfriend Tony Spera (Ben Hardy), and the sequence serves the same function as Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) funeral at the end of Avengers: Endgame. It features cameos from various actors from the previous three Conjuring films, including Lili Taylor, Mackenzie Foy, Frances O’Connor and Julian Hilliard. Franchise creator James Wan also cameos.

There is, of course, a tension in how the series mythologizes the Warrens, who in real-life were con artists and hustlers. The films go out of their way to stress that they are based on “a true story”, and take the Warrens to a variety of famous “real” hauntings like Amityville, Enfield and West Pittston. The series presents these events uncritically, framing the older Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) as divine superheroes. In Last Rites, Ed gripes that Ghostbusters belittles their work.

Last Rites is at its clumsiest when it tries to imbue a fairly standard haunted house mythos with epic import, as it is revealed that – in the sort of symmetry that one only finds in the work of con artists or freshmen writing courses – their first case will also be their last. The evil mirror from their first investigation has found its way into the hands of a family in West Pittston, Pennsylvania and is terrorizing that household as a way to finally get at Ed and Lorraine, through Judy.

However, stepping back from the weight of the larger franchise and the blockbuster tropes, there is something interesting simmering beneath the surface of Last Rites. At its core, it is about masculine anxieties. It is a study of impotent and absent men, and the ways that these uncertainties and frustrations spill out in the most unpredictable of ways. It is another of the recent wave of films about parents being unable to protect their children, specifically fathers. 

This theme of failed parents is such a central theme that the film is framed as a story about Ed and Lorraine’s abandonment of the daughter who lost her father in the opening scenes. Lorraine went into premature labor during their encounter with the mirror, and the couple never returned to deal with the demonic mirror. There is an argument that ghost stories are ultimately stories of conscience, the voices of the dead trying to save the living from or condemn them to damnation. Ed and Lorraine failed in their first case, but this is a chance to make things right. 

Late Rites is largely driven by Ed. This is a strange choice. Lorraine is Judy’s mother. The open sequence reveals that Judy was stillborn, the umbilical cord wrapped around Judy’s neck. She came back after being dead for a whole minute. Lorraine and Judy both share a paranormal gift, a sixth sense. Lorraine has spent years using her skill to teach Judy to manage that ability, to shut out the darkness and to avoid being swallowed by the demons lurking in the shadows. It makes sense that a story about Judy should also be a story about Lorraine.

Instead, Last Rites suggests that Lorraine is doing fairly okay. Lorraine is at peace. Lorraine is obviously worried about Judy, but she is generally willing to take things as they come. Unlike Ed, Lorraine is not bothered by Ghostbusters. Lorraine eagerly embraces Tony as Judy’s boyfriend, while Ed struggles with him. When Tony asks the pair for their blessing to ask Judy to marry him, Lorraine is immediately thrilled, while Ed is a lot more uncertain.

More to the point, Last Rites is driven by Ed’s failing health. It is revealed early in the movie that Ed recently suffered a severe heart attack, and this caused the couple to give up their ghost-hunting endeavors. Unlike the other two women in his household, Ed simply is not strong enough to keep doing what he should be doing. He is also clearly anxious about this. His doctor (Guy Oliver-Watts) makes the point that Ed is not taking his health seriously and he refuses to acknowledge that his health is why he retired.

The households in Last Rites are often overwhelmingly female. The movie’s central haunting targets the Smurl family. In the opening stretch of the movie, Jack Smurl (Elliot Cowan), is largely absent as his wife Janet (Rebecca Calder) and their daughters are harassed by demons. Jack is either at work or invisible behind the camera. Jack is unable to protect his family. At one point, his daughter Heather (Kíla Lord Cassidy) challenges him, “You either don’t believe us or won’t help us – which is it?”

On visiting the Smurl household, Lorraine discovers that the house is haunted by the spirits of another family who lived on that land centuries ago. Abner (Leigh Jones) lived with his wife Nellie (Grace Kemp) and Nellie’s mother, another household in which the patriarch is outnumbered. There are repeated suggestions that Abner felt emasculated. The couple did not have children, and Nellie was reportedly having an affair with another man.

Last Rites is fascinated by impotence and absence. Jack’s first encounter with the spirits in his home finds him paralyzed in bed as he is mounted by Nellie. Ed’s motorbike refuses to start until Tony replaces the spark plug. Father Gordon vows to bring support from the Catholic Church, and goes to visit the archbishop, only to find himself left waiting in the lobby with the archbishop’s secretary (Jemma Churchill). While Jack’s mother (Kate Fahy) leaves the home for medical reasons, his father (Peter Wight) just disappears completely from the narrative.

Around the midpoint of the film, Tony tells Ed why he retired from the police force at such a young age. He recalls a call to a domestic disturbance that ended with a shotgun pointed at his face. The assailant pulled the trigger – Tony heard the click – but the gun did not go off. There is a strong recurring sense in Last Rites that the men in this story all feel somewhat emasculated, and are perhaps displacing that anxiety in a variety of directions.

There are points where this subtext feels very deliberate. Janet’s first glimpse of Abner manifests from a painting of John Wayne that the family hangs in their basement. It’s a fun gender-swapped invocation of the painting of the nun (Bonnie Aarons) from The Conjuring 2, but it also plays with that idea of masculinity. John Wayne embodied an old-fashioned American masculinity, but he was also born “Marion Robert Morrison” and skipped out on service in the Second World War.

It is too much to suggest that Last Rites is engaging in overt criticism of this fragile masculinity. The climax of the film focuses on the three men – Ed, Jack and Tony – meeting in the attic to deal with the mirror while Lorraine, Judy and Janet tend to the girls downstairs. When the demon tries to hang Judy from the rafters, it is Ed and Tony who try to save her while Lorraine watches, screaming. It is frustrating how passive Lorraine and even Judy end up feeling in what is ostensibly the final movie in a series about a married couple who have largely treated each other as equals.

To a certain extent, this is to be expected. The Conjuring franchise is an extremely Catholic horror franchise, like The Exorcist, and these sorts of movies tend to express anxieties about the perceived shifts in contemporary culture. Indeed, the theme of an absent father is perhaps the most Catholic theme imaginable. What is God in Catholic teaching but the archbishop locked away behind those fine oak doors as Father Gordon waits patiently in the lobby?

Last Rites is set in 1986, precisely midway through the Reagan-Bush era. The Smurl family live in Pittsburgh, which expository news dialogue defines as coal country. A refinery looms large over the household. Director Michael Chaves frames most of the early establishing shots of the family home to include that massive industrial complex, creating a sense of gloom and darkness that pervades the film even beyond the supernatural entities.

Pittsburgh is heavily industrialized. However, those industries are in decline. The local steel industry was already in decline by the events of Last Rites, with the loss of roughly 95,000 of the one million jobs in the area between 1980 and 1983. By January 1983, the adjusted unemployment rate hit 17.1%. To be fair, coal production – the industry explicitly mentioned in the film – was actually somewhat stable during the 1980s, averaging 17 million tons a week between 1984 and 1988.

The coal industry would collapse during the 2010s. Between 2011 and 2016, experts estimate that the coal industry lost 94% of its value, dropping from $68.6bn to just $4.02bn. This left thousands of miners unemployed. Steel and coal are often perceived as particularly masculine industries, with historian Joshua Freeman talking about the archetype of American steelworkers “as intensely masculine, often bare-chested, with muscles rippling.”

Sociologist Michael Kimmel has talked about how so many of the men affected by these shifts can feel that “the current order of things has emasculated them.” These trends were the result of global trends and economic forces operating at a level far beyond the individual, and so their loss – and the resulting damage to these communities and to these works – could feel almost supernatural. It was something that could be felt and perceived far easier than it could be explained.

So much of the current chaos in American politics – including the recent crippling tariffs – was motivated by “a concern with restoring manly jobs”, the hope of reviving and resurrecting those traditionally masculine industries like mining and manufacturing while doing away with “effete email jobs.” Last Rites is not explicitly about any of this, but that is the beauty of horror stories. These specters lurk in the background, barely visible, their presence keenly felt.

Perhaps consciously or perhaps accidentally, Last Rites makes a compelling argument for the current political moment as a sort of ghost story, a tale of displaced rage and anger, masculine anxiety, and a past that will not remain buried.