THE EXORCISM

Conjuring 3 opens with the exorcism of David Glatzel. I wanted a big nightmarish sequence where we push the Warrens to the limit. This was a sequence that took a lot of work and was ultimately the collaboration of a lot of very talented people.

I’m writing this now with a couple years of distance on the movie and I still think it’s really scary and works well to open it. I think my favorite part of it comes down to story - we get to see the Warrens fail. Seeing your heroes fail is important. This is especially true for the Warrens who have been basically bullet proof up to this point in the series.

If you’re a fan or a filmmaker I hope this gives you an insight into how we put this together.

THE SCRIPT & STORYBOARDS

As with everything when you’re making a movie: it starts on the page. David Leslie Johnson imagined a fantastic sequence. It was originally set in a church, but ultimately I felt like a home exorcism felt scarier. We always called this sequence “Conjuring 2.5” - as if we were just coming in on the finale of another Conjuring movie.

For storyboards I sometimes like to draw my own boards. They’re not always that pretty, but you get the idea. It forces me to think about placement of the actors - how many people are in the scene. Lot of important things you don’t think about. For example, originally the entire family was there in the exorcism - but as I was boarding I realized that was a total of 9 people in the scene - which got very crowded as I was trying to imagine stunts. So I knew needed to “thin out” the crowd which is the reason I had Carl Glatzel (played by Paul Wilson, Patrick’s brother) stabbed upstairs.

I find that so much of movie making you are constantly working forwards and backwards - finding problems and then reverse engineering a solution.

STUNTS & CONTORTIONS

I knew I wanted we needed some big, torturous experience for David to go through and I wanted to make sure that it would be (as much as possible) a real, in-camera experience. One of the big obstacles with this is you can’t have a kid perform a stunt. And what qualifies as a stunt can be really restrictive.

There’s a lot of people who made this sequence work - but just highlight three core members of the team:

  • Glen Foster - our amazing stunt coordinator who helped design these moments with me and found the incredible talent. He has an incredible team and really did a great job on this.

  • Molly Miller - the very talented adult stunt double for Julian Hilliard.

  • Emerald Gordon Wulf - the young contortionist who did these amazing twists. Her twists and snaps were all in camera without wires or any other support. She is absolutely the corner stone of what makes this sequence work.

Take a look below at one of the moments before we added the face replacement of Julian Hilliard.