“The Conjuring: Last Rites” fails to scare even in our small-town theater

The Conjuring series is one I have seen in passing  — another scary movie my parents might have watched in the living room I would look at for four seconds before asking my mom whatever question I had and quickly scurrying off into my safe, comfortable bedroom where I would watch more lighthearted, non-scary videos. I never understood horror, I don’t like jumpscares, blood, or the idea of watching something to purposefully get scared. For that reason, when I have suffered through any scary movie, it has been completely against my own will. 

This was one of those times. When my best friend told me I had to watch this movie with her, I was dreading it immediately, but I couldn’t let her down. The most logical next step was to prepare. I researched the show times to see how long I would have to endure the pain  — which took forever to find since the cinema website was scattered with bright colors and hard to read text — and I invited another friend to come with me for emotional support. I am grateful she came with me and I do not regret inviting her but the “emotional support” had been wasted. To me, “The Conjuring: Last Rites” wasn’t scary or even good.

To start off this evil review I want to clarify that I haven’t seen any of the other movies in the series before this. Perhaps, that is why I was surprised when I found this movie familiar and I felt like I had seen it before, and funnily enough, I had. I have seen plenty of Tik Toks that highlight every single plot point that this movie had while mocking it. Let me explain, “The Conjuring: Last Rites” had so many horror cliches that I was shocked that it was even a real horror movie and not a parody. I truly believed these stereotypical horror plot points that people made fun of weren’t seen in popular horror movies but rather old ones with little to no budget. 

These are only some of the stereotypical plot points “The Conjuring: Last Rites” used: getting accidentally gifted a haunted item that the store owner graciously gave for free, trying to destroy said haunted item and it leading to spooky bad things, the item returning fully intact in a different part of the house, children’s toys with no battery still moving – how about a familiar loving voice of a family member coming from upstairs? When the viewers are acutely aware that the real family member is outside and not upstairs? Or perhaps the camera focusing on anything and the music gets louder and louder and ope! There’s a demon on the screen now! Who could’ve guessed! Frankly, I was able to see almost every jumpscare before it happened and only jumped at one because I didn’t get the timing in my head the exact way that it was set up and as I made clear before, the plot itself seemed lacking, almost as if it was trying to mark every box of what a scary movie is and forgot to bring anything new to it table.
As someone who doesn’t watch horror frequently, yet still caught on to plenty of repetitive things that happened, this movie should have been horrifically bad to anyone who is a horror fan, right? Well, surprisingly, I mainly heard good things about the movie, and my best friend and the friend I brought with me — both being horror fanatics — loved it. Although, they may have been biased since they are both hardcore fans of the series since the first movie. I was told by them that the movie had plenty of cameos from previous characters in the series and perhaps I would have seen more of an interesting, full plot if I had seen the other movies in the series before this.
One of the first things I was told by my series fanatic friends was that the movies had improved in quality a lot since the first one. Personally, in the big 2025, I expected a lot better. For example, there was a scene where Loreli — one of the main characters — was washing some dishes and the water didn’t want to drain. She kept trying and trying — I became horrified thinking that a gross demon hand would come out from it and would pull her face into the water to try to harm her or that her hand was about to accidentally get grated with the garbage disposal.  I was truly stressed, on the edge of my seat ready to cover my eyes but then, honestly anti-climatically, the water became blood, and it overflowed onto the floor. It looked like the most unrealistic blood I had ever seen in a newer movie. Granted, I haven’t seen many movies with blood recently, but from what I remember, it normally doesn’t look like slime or that you can still see the gray sink underneath it as if they had forgotten to turn the opacity all the way up.

The anticipation for that disappointing scene was the most ‘scared’ I felt that entire movie. I will give the benefit of doubt though, since this was a vision of the character, they might have edited it that way on purpose to show that.
I watched this movie at Downtown Cinema 8 with my three friends, the first horror movie I had watched on the big screen. There was also a couple behind us who I believe left halfway through. Since Kirksville is a small town, after a movie is out in theatres for longer than a month, the showings become vacant. To make matters worse, there was rumbling through the top of the theater which sounded like a swarm of spiders crawling through the ceiling. It was unsettling, but given that the cinema opened in 2001 and the photos still look the same as when it opened, the buildings might be in need of renovation, and the spiders were likely just the wind rumbling through the cinema’s tall ceilings. Even though the building is small, old and run down, it has a cute charm to it especially since the showings are inexpensive in comparison to bigger cinema companies. 

I enjoyed the experience, getting to be with my friends, and honestly I am relieved that it wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Perhaps, my negative review comes from a place of discomfort and misunderstanding from not having seen many of the other horror movies and I might have had my expectations too high since people all around me love the series so dearly. I might have been too cautious as well, being that I was well prepared to be scared at all times, so maybe I just didn’t allow myself to be scared. Truthfully, I do enjoy watching psychological horror and it sticks with me a lot more than jumpscares alone, and normally psychological horror has more connection to real world problems than just demons and gore. These types of movies make more sense to be labeled as horror than something like “The Conjuring: Last Rites.”