Annabelle Comes Home follows the dark story of the nightmare that’s unleashed when the demonic doll is set free inside of the room of evil objects inside the home of The Conjuring demon hunters Ed and Lorraine Waren. This time around Annabelle is able to get help from the host of other evil and/or demonic spirits trapped in the Warrens’ storeroom – and one of those spirits may confirm what the upcoming The Conjuring 3 is going to be about!
Read below for the breakdown of what Annabelle 3 possibly reveals about The Conjuring 3 – but be warned, MAJOR SPOILERS follow!
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Once the evil forces are set loose in the Warrens’ home, they begin to terrorize the Warrens’ daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace), her babysitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman), and Mary’s friends Daniela (Katie Sarife) and Bob (Michael Cimino). Each kid has to face a different evil spirit from the Warrens’ old case files – and in the case of poor Bob, whose stuck outside trying to pull off a guitar serenade of his crush, Mary Ellen, he has to face the infamous Essex Werewolf!
The new evil addition to the Conjuring universe is teased early on in Annabelle Comes Home, when the teen girls are snooping around the Warrens case files. They find the account of the Essex Werewolf, along with a book related to the case, whose cover has clearly been clawed by the beast. The Werewolf ends up manifest outside the Warrens’ house to stand sentry, and mostly ends up chasing after Bob. The finally (sort of) defeat the Werewolf when Judy tries to escape the house to retrieve Mary Ellen’s asthma inhaler, and ends up getting saved from the wolf by a guitar-swinging Bob. By the end of the film, the Essex Werewolf is returned to containment in the Warrens’ trophy room.
Here’s where The Conjuring 3 connection comes in:
For months fans have speculated about what the Conjuring 3‘s plot will be, with two main cases emerging as the likely picks:
- Werewolf: The True Story of Demonic Possession – a book the Warrens wrote about a man named Bill Ramsey in Southend, England, who believed he was possessed by a demon that looked like a wolf, leading to violent attacks and an eventual exorcism attempt by the Warrens.
- The 1981 case of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, who killed his landlord and claimed he did so while being possessed by the same demon the Warrens had exorcised from his fiancรฉe’s brother.
The second case got a lot of weight after James Wan was quoted as saying The Conjuring 3 is about, “this guy who was on trial for committing a murder. I think it’s the first time in America’s history where the defendant used possessions as a reason, as an excuse.”
However, the first scenario originally got major cred, after both James Wan and Vera Farmiga teased that The Conjuring 3 could be about werewolves, some years back. Of course, that werewolf idea may have evolved into part of the plotline for Annabelle 3 – but it’s also important to remember that there is some kind of precedent for this in The Conjuring franchise.
The first Conjuring introduced the Annabelle doll as just a supporting villain in the story, but Annabelle was then spun out into its own major franchise. The Conjuring 2 and Annabelle 2 both featured the demonic Nun as a villain, and that creature was then spun out into its own spinoff film, as well. So, while Annabelle Comes Home does introduce several new evil spirits that The Conjuring Universe could focus on later, the Essex Werewolf is definitely given the most weight and backstory. If anything was a setup for The Conjuring 3, that would be our bet.
…On the ohter hand, a key moment in Annabelle Comes Home hinges on footage of the Warrens performing a chaotic exorcism that we haven’t yet seen in the franchise. In that sense, the case of Arne Cheyenne Johnson being the story of The Conjuring 3 is something that could’ve also been hiding right in plain sight.
Annabelle Comes Home is now in theaters.
