Bridget McAnulty ’15
Staff Writer
This white-faced, pink-cheeked, porcelain doll is certainly not the comforting toy you’d like to find yourself sleeping next to at night. Annabelle, the prequel to the bone chilling horror The Conjuring successfully raises the hairs on the back of your neck with its mix of old-school spookery and nerve-jolting action. This fright-fest directed by John R. Leonetti, is set in the early 1970s and is terrifyingly based on real-life events involving this 3-foot doll that is possessed by the spirit of evil.
The movie opens with a brief prologue of three young women seeking professional help about this doll that moves around their apartment all by itself. The story then jumps back to a year earlier when John Horton gives his pregnant wife, Mia, this antique porcelain doll that she’s been looking for in order to complete her collection. The film then escalates to the brutal murder of the couple’s neighbors, as well as an attack on Mia and her husband themselves. The female attacker grabbed Mia’s doll and held it tight before slitting her throat and taking her own life. As the blood poured from the woman’s neck a drop of blood fell into the dolls eye. As the story continues, we find out that the Horton’s neighbors were killed by their estranged daughter named Annabelle. Annabelle had run off several years before in order to join a satanic cult and came back to murder her parents as an offering to the devil himself. As this fast paced horror continues Mia encounters several acts of supernatural activity to the point where her and her husband have to pack up their lives and move. As you may assume, the terror doesn’t end there.
If you’re in the mood for a thrilling, heart-racing, horror, then this movie will definitely satisfy your needs this Halloween season.
