On July 19 , 2025, The Conjuring movie came out. Now, thirteen years later, there are three mainline Conjuring movies, and 56 spin-offs, including three Annabelle movies, two The Nun movies, and The Curse of La Llorona.
And now, the Conjuring series comes to an end with The Conjuring: Last Rites, the tenth and final movie.
I first watched The Conjuring as a third or fourth grader, so, as a senior, watching this series come to an end is bittersweet. On one hand, I am happy this series will not be played out longer than the actors have a passion for it (cough cough, Stranger Things, cough cough).
On the other hand, I remember the first scary movie I saw was The Conjuring.
The Conjuring: Last Rites takes place in 1986, five years after we last saw the Warrens. After having been in retirement for most of the past five years, Ed and Lorraine are forced to come back one last time for the Smurl family haunting, this time with their daughter, Judy, and her boyfriend,
The film’s biggest weakness is how long it takes for the Warrens to go to the Smurl house. The film is 2 hours and 15 minutes, yet it takes over an hour for the Warrens to go to the Smurl house.
However, this is made up for by how eerie the film is otherwise. When a jumpscare was being built up, it always ended up with an actual jumpscare.
Along with this, there were a lot of callbacks in this film. For example, the first film’s director, James Wan, made an appearance, along with characters from the other films.
These cameos really helped solidify that this is the end of the series, since a lot of times, franchises will say a movie is the last in the series, then it ends up not being the end.
Another downfall of this movie is there seems to be no constant “rules” within the franchise of what will and will not stop the demons. For example, it seems Judy, the Warren’s daughter, can make the apparitions go away by closing her eyes and wishing them away.
This is not canonical for how it works with any of the other Conjuring movies. In the first The Conjuring movie, the possession ended because of family, and a mothers love. While this is present in this film, it does not seem to be the reason the demon stopped attacking the family.
But maybe this is me reading too much into this; it is a film, and film rules rarely, if ever follow real-life rules.
Overall it was a good movie, maybe a little slow, but really good, and the rules followed, or not followed do not really matter.
