The Conjuring 2 replaced a cool devil man design with its scary nun, James Wan explains
Wan showed footage of an unused demon costume that was replaced with The Conjuring 2's nun at the last minute
Film Features Conjuring 2
The Conjuring movies are pretty good, pretty scary demon-centric horror films. As a side effect of being pretty good, pretty scary demon-centric horror films that star ghost-hunting Christian hucksters, they’re also movies that serve a secondary function as nightmare advertisements for the power of Christ to defeat even the scariest ghouls and ghosts.
In light of this, it isn’t surprising that one of the series’ breakout specters is a spooky nun, who first appeared in the second Conjuring to terrify lapsed Catholics with memories of being yelled at by habit-wearing spinsters before she embarked on a solo career with her very own spin-off movie.
As The Conjuring 2 director James Wan explains in a recent Instagram post, this scary nun almost didn’t appear in the movie. She was, in fact, originally meant to be portrayed in the much cooler form of a towering, horned devil man that Wan’s shown off on his Instagram and described as “the best demon I never used.”
A video from the post sees the movie’s composer, Joseph Bishara, standing on set in a wrinkly black bodysuit with taloned gloves as a sweet demon head is set down on his shoulders. The clip then shows off the monster’s animatronics in action, its bloody mouth working aimlessly and its yellow eyes squinting open and closed as if it’s trying its best to read aloud from a particularly difficult section of a (presumably evil) book.
Wan writes that “this winged demon” featured “a beautifully/hideously sculpted animatronic puppet head and practical body-suit” designed by collaborator Justin Raleigh and the team at Fractured FX Inc. Its wings would have been created through CGI, though Wan says that he thinks he has “only one fully finished shot with CGI wings in place.”
“It was really grand and epic,” Wan continues. “But as cool as it was, it felt out of place within the Conjuring world we had built.”
While The Conjuring 2 was in post-production, Wan “reconceived the villain” in order to make the demon Valak into something “more grounded, more personal, and creepier.” The evil nun design was then created and used in the movie instead of the original concept. “New scare set-pieces like the ‘painting on the wall’” were also added to the movie to take advantage of the redesign.
That’s all well and good, but we still believe that the bloody-mouthed demon guy gets his due. If The Nun 2 and other spin-offs get to exist, surely Wan and Co. can make room for a movie starring this big ol’ freak.
[via Bloody Disgusting]
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4 Comments
WOW, that sucks. No wonder they replaced it.
Yeah the nun is way better than another generic demon creature.
Love a cool animatronic monster, but wow is it hard to have them not look a little cheesy. Between the limits of puppetry and the fact that humans are wired to look for human features and fixate on slight aberrations, it’s no surprise that successful horror movies have tended to go with uncanny-valley-looking humans over beasties.When you get one that really does it right though, like Aliens or The Thing, it’s amazing.
Well whether you liked the conjuring/nun movies or not, I will agree that their original demon doesn’t seem like it would fit in the kind of tone the movie sets up. It is a hard thing to execute well. When a movie tries to keep the scares on a somewhat grounded level, only to get something that is so jarring then it can take the audiences out of the moment or even get unintentional laughter. I would not expect a demon like that in a Conjuring movie, or Insidious movie. I would sooner see something like that in the Witcher, or Dungeons & Dragons. Again, it’s a hard thing to pull off without. David Cronenberg’s The Fly is a good example of how it can be done well. Archive 81’s Space God is an example how it didn’t come off as well as they hoped.From that photo of the unused demon, I can see how cool it looks but at the same time how cheesy it could’ve ended up if they went ahead with it. Whenever shooting involves this kind of stuff, lighting is important. Otherwise it does come off as a very expensive Halloween park set piece. And I can’t help but laugh a little at what an overbite it has.