Bad Movie Mondays: Annabelle
It’s important to watch bad movies because they teach us what not to do.
I am of the firm belief that bad art is more informative than good art. As aspiring storytellers, it’s more accessible for us to engage with art that we feel as if we could roll up our sleeves, get under the hood, and put in some aftermarket parts to help get back on the road. Good art is almost too imposing, and sometimes too highly regarded by us that we treat it like a magic spell that we don’t have the gumption or dexterity to even attempt on our own. So, I wanted to start this weekly series, “Bad Movie Mondays.”
In this series, I will pick a movie and ask, “How could this be better?” And that answer can’t be the cynical wisecrack, “Just don’t make it,” or “Make it better.” I want to have substantive discussion about what makes or breaks storytelling, for me. And I hope you’ll enjoy this series, as much as I will as we begin this Hollow Eve’s week with John R. Leonetti’s Annabelle.
I watched this last weekend when visiting my mother who was aching for a horror movie marathon with the only member of the family who was down to share some beers, a few slices of pizza, and some horror movies with their mom. It was great and lovely, but this was one of the movies on the docket that my mother chose, and it does not work on a few levels. And here’s why: It doesn’t have a reason to exist.
Even as you go back and try to find interviews and explanations for either director John R. Leonetti or screenwriter Gary Dauberman’s intentions, it becomes clear it was a studio-fed movie to piggyback off of the success of James Wan’s The Conjuring. It was a movie with little press and found little critical approval, however, it was a very profitable entry into the franchise, far exceeding its production budget at the box office.
Annabelle follows the doll’s origins who was born out of a cultish, Manson family-esque murder gone wrong turned to suicide. The devil-worshipping spirit of one of the perpetrators possesses the doll and then haunts a young family to finish the summoning of a demon via a sacrifice of some kind.
Technically speaking, a lot is working in this movie. Ward Horton and Annabelle Wallis are doing enough work to get by and are never distracting or offensive, and Leonetti conjures some great ideas for horror set pieces. There are some genuinely well-crafted scares, even if they fall short. Some of that is because of Leonetti’s reliance on a script that just doesn’t understand what it wants to say, the other part is his vice grip on the movie itself.
In an interview with Backstage, Leonetti admitted to adopting a Hitchcockian approach of meticulously planning out each shot before going to set and went as far as to chart each character’s emotional arc on paper and shoot the film in sequence to preserve the growing tension of the narrative.
“It helps the actors know where they are emotionally,” Leonetti says. “Once you start shooting and you have all this preparation, you’re on the same page. Then you just go make the movie. It makes it so easy to make a change. It’s so easy to use a better idea, it’s so easy to just make it better. And there the magic happens.”
That desire for precision explains the absence of tension, I think, because not allowing for invention or intrusion on set might create tighter control of the story, but also strips the stage for magic. There’s no room for an actor or an AD to improvise something that might work a little better. Having too much of a grip on your art and not allowing for those slivers of space that allow for a quick 180, or a reinterpretation, or maybe a changing of the trajectory can be the knife in the heart of a story.
I‘ve followed an outline so closely before that it cut me off from creativity. The sign of a good writer is allowing for a change shifting and variance while writing and then making it look as though you knew what you were doing the whole time. And that’s something that is noticeably placating this movie, and I think some of that invention could come in giving Annabelle a little less story and the families that surround her a little more.
While Dauberman’s script checks off those boxes of your average, run-of-the-mill Hollywood horror flick, it also seems like it wants to say something about motherhood or even the cultish backdrop of its setting. And a lot of that gets muted behind the exposition given to the doll in question, and the tropic path of finding a person of color who can somehow purify the house. Instead, I think what a great redrafting of the story might tell us is to listen to those first inclinations and tell a story about the many sides of motherhood.
What if the daughter was driven to join a cult by an abusive father, by a neglectful mother? And what if she’s tied herself to this new family to correct the wrongs she endured? What if she’s not trying to collect the soul of the child as much as take control of him and raise him as she would’ve wanted to have been raised? There’s a way to plot out this story in a way that argues to not meet a ghost with hostility but with empathy and to undercut the Conjuring universes’ style of haunting with something a bit more heart-wrenching.
For example, let’s say the daughter was neglected by overly conservative and busy parents, driving her away to the Manson family. She seeks identity and finds it by a persuadable cult. She comes back, kills her parents, and attempts to kill the neighbors too, but it doesn’t work. John and his pregnant wife, Mia, escape this near death experience but start to notice things are off with the doll John gifted Mia. Spooky shenanigans occur, until Mia’s husband leaves and a fire occurs, leaving his pregnant wife injured but no longer pregnant. The baby is born, but the haunting continues.
Mia, now a mother, decides to look into this crazed woman further. She discovers her parents were neglectful, her father was work obsessed. All while her husband becomes growingly more work obsessed, but making this a bigger story beat, rather than a backdrop, elevates that theme of a mother facing evil on her own. She eventually seeks help from Alfre Woodard’s character. Instead of making her the token black woman who knows spiritual stuff, when can just make her a neighbor in building. She bumps into her and discovers she was a mother too, until her daughter died in a car accident.
She can then tie those themes together further, a mother who can forewarn the problems of neglecting a child and that they can be gone before your ready, to cherish every moment, and so on. You get it. Then, we can then push all of this onto Mia who is forced to confront the demon on her own. As she promises to be the mother he child deserves, final battle ensues, and this story becomes far more about those maternal themes. You could even go as far as to give further backstory to Mia’s mother, maybe the doll can represent her own neglectful mother because we never learn why she collects dolls.
Either way, themes require repetition and symmetry, and giving Annabelle that symmetry between mothers and daughters and asking what it means to be a good mother has more meat on its bones than just a demon haunting a pregnant woman. And that’s what missing most from this movie, meat on the bone. I don’t think it’s necessarily an offensive work, it just never commits to an idea. And sometimes, for better or worse, you have to commit. It’s better to be maligned for missing the mark than to be forgotten for not even attempting to aim for something. So write with nothing to lose, that’s all we can do.
