Finally—a horror movie fun-time ride that’s worth every shiny penny! At the screening I attended, I counted 12 distinct moments where the audience collectively jumped in their seats, giddy with audible fright. I also made a note of how many times the two teenage girls and one preteen boy outright SCREAMED (four times!). Director James Wan (Saw, Insidious) certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel, or even try to do anything groundbreaking or original with The Conjuring, but what he does flawlessly, with impeccable pacing and old-fashioned horror-movie timing, is make a truly scary film—an experience not unlike paying your hard-earned money to walk through a haunted house.

The story is based on an experience by real-life 1970s ghost-hunting power couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (exorcists and original investigators of the Amityville house, before it was a book or movie franchise). It maintains a perfect balance of charmingly retro Satan-hysteria (demonic possession! Witches! Priests! Holy water!) and classic haunted-house trickery (doors slamming! Doors opening themselves! Rocking chairs rocking with no one sitting in them!). This balance, combined with spot-on acting by Vera Farmiga as Lorraine and Lili Taylor as the mother trying to save her family from certain demonic doom, is perfectly reminiscent of greats like Poltergeist, The Omen, and The Exorcist (especially the latter, with the pea soup Satan-vomit being modernized with an Abu Ghraib–esque bedsheet and a whole lotta blood). recommended