WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Annabelle Comes Home, in theaters now.
When it comes to modern horror movies, you can expect your fill of abnormally stupid characters. You'll have people falling down at the most inopportune times, mostly when a killer's chasing them, not to mention, when things go bump in the night, folks would rather investigate themselves than call the cops... or just leave. But again, these are all part and parcel of the genre.
However, as Annabelle Comes Home proves, the current trend of these movies is to rely way too much on dumb characters rather than the power of the villains themselves, making the films pretty hard to take seriously.
The Conjuring Universe in particular is rife with these moments. Quite often, when families literally encounter signs of their houses being undeniably inhabited by spirits -- kids being pulled from beds, objects thrown around rooms, strange noises, etc. -- they somehow opt to stay at the abode.
The Curse of La Llorona took it to a next level with a family forgetting to board up a door from the killer bride, as well as having a young girl breaking a protective seal to get a doll back. At this point, it's like these people want to be killed. And honestly, this problem exists outside of this cinematic universe, proved by recent film, The Rite, which clearly showed Anthony Hopkins' Father Lucas exhibiting signs of demonic possession, yet none of his peers pick up on it.
It's taken to the extreme, however, by director Gary Dauberman in Annabelle Comes Home as he uses the dumbest characters a horror script could ask for. Mckenna Grace's Judy Warren is haunted by visions of a dead priest, not to mention she sees the Annabelle doll and the Bloody Bride moseying around the house in broad daylight, yet at no point does she think of calling her parents -- professional demon hunters -- or even letting her babysitter, Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman), know what's up. The latter also has a supernatural run-in with a girl that disappears into thin air, and her friend Daniela (Katie Sarife) even sees the ghost of her dead dad in the Warren home, yet no one says anything.
It gets worse later on because, apart from not telling each other anything, they don't put on the lights, they don't look for fire sources (even after seeing it's a deterrent against the malevolent forces attacking), and worst of all, Daniela's whole logic for finicking around in the Warrens' storage and inadvertently releasing the entities is utterly mindless. She opens this Pandora's Box because she wants to speak with her father's ghost, yet didn't think of asking the world renowned Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) -- who's all over the press for her talents -- to conduct a seance.
Lorraine even communicates with the man for Daniela at the end, proving how senseless Daniela's initial plan was. She was a believer, so hearing Judy warn her about the room should have been enough to discourage her from such antics in the first place, but she still went on to wander in and touch everything Judy said was evil, all for the sake of plot convenience.
Honestly, this film is a bumbling mess of haphazard choices, and it's perfectly summed up by the Warrens leaving a key to this demonic storage room -- one which could unleash literal hell on Earth -- right above the doorframe. Yeah, with a teenager at home, that's a pretty safe and totally unpredictable hiding spot.
This is the kind of logic that had the Paranormal Activity franchise making us giggle more than jump with fright. It has to be a modern problem because these kinds of issues also cropped up in Hereditary where Peter's (Alex Wolff) possession was obvious, especially with a family who had clear-cut ties to the occult, yet for some reason no one spotted it.
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This devalues the monsters, demons and villains because, rather than play up their strengths, modern Hollywood horrors give more weight to the stupidity of heroes and heroines. When you look back at things like The Exorcist and The Thing, you can see these films from that era succeeded and resonated as classics because they didn't rely on numbskull characters; they simply had brilliant ones being outsmarted by genius enemies.
Such physical and cerebral threats make for better films, and it's why Linda Blair's Regan MacNeil remains the gold standard in a genre that elevated us to think in moments of suspended disbelief, horror and tension. Now, though, we're being pandered to by scripts that are uninventive, derivative, formulaic (as the Conjuring Universe has now gotten) and lastly, just lacking intriguing faces who do more than luck in and out of bad situations.
Written and directed by Gary Dauberman, Annabelle Comes Home stars Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Mckenna Grace, Madison Iseman and Katie Sarife.