The Demon We Buried, But Hollywood Resurrected

It’s not the blood, or the screams, or the cinematography veiled in faux incense smoke that unsettles you. It’s the name. That one unspoken word, the demon that launched the Conjuring franchise—a name whispered in the Warrens’ first real-life case, now cracked open again in Last Rites like a cursed reliquary. A demon that Hollywood, ever hungry, has summoned once more.

The trailer doesn’t so much introduce the film as it dares you to remember. A grainy priest, a trembling girl, a voice not of this world. The demon—unnamed, barely shown—isn’t just the villain. It’s the franchise’s patient zero. What Last Rites suggests is not another spin-off, but a return. Not a sequel. A séance.

Horror Has a Memory Longer Than Ours

Last Rites doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like a reckoning. For Warner Bros., it’s a clever reinvigoration of a fading mythos—The Conjuring cinematic universe was flickering, its demons becoming memes. But this? This is resurrection with teeth. Not just of narrative, but of controversy.

The Warrens’ legacy, long contested by skeptics and believers alike, is once again being repackaged for spectacle. “We didn’t make it up,” Lorraine Warren once said in a 1980s interview. “We just opened the door.” This film swings it wide open, dragging back into daylight a case that, by all accounts, should have remained buried in the unrecorded past. Is it bravery? Or something else entirely?

When the Devil Becomes Intellectual Property

There’s something blasphemous—and eerily modern—about turning demonic possession into blockbuster bait. In a world that’s grown numb to horror, the only thing left that scares us is the suggestion that some of it might be real. The franchise no longer trades on fear—it trades on faith, on doubt, on the gossamer-thin line between folklore and fact.

But this isn’t The Exorcist. This is branded fear, finely tuned for algorithmic consumption. A demon once spoken of in hushed tones by fringe paranormalists now returns as an entertainment asset—complete with jump cuts and Dolby sound. It begs the question: when horror revives a real-life evil for profit, who’s actually being haunted?

We may not remember its name, but somewhere, something does.