Annabelle Will Pop out of Your TV and Kill You if You Watch This
'Annabelle: Creation' tells the origin story of the haunted doll.
Annabelle, the possessed doll from The Conjuring, got her own prequel film in 2014. Now Annabelle is set to have its own prequel, set in The Conjuring universe. The official trailer for Annabelle: Creation, which premieres August 11, came out on Saturday. In it, we get a glimpse into the origin of the possessed doll, Annabelle, and boy is it creepy.
The trailer opens with a nun and a group of young girls arriving at the home of a dollmaker and his wife. It’s a textbook example of a haunted house: peeling paint, high gables, and of course, a room that remains locked at all times. The girls have been invited to stay there since their orphanage closed. The protagonist, a young girl with a leg brace and a crutch, quickly learns about the forbidden room.
“Locked,” the dollmaker tells her when she tries the doorknob. “And it stays that way.” Message received.
Things get even weirder when our protagonist hears a record playing in the forbidden room and — of course — goes to investigate. There, she encounters a young girl she’s never seen before. And well, you can guess what happens from there.
Later in the trailer, we learn a little bit about the doll’s history. The dollmaker and his wife lost their daughter in a car accident when she was a child, and they prayed to see her again. She — or “it,” as the dollmaker’s wife refers to the ghostly presence — began to appear in their home. They soon gave it permission to inhabit a doll, because of course they did. Unsurprisingly, it seems like that may have been a mistake.
Annabelle: Creation is directed by David F. Sandberg (Lights Out) with a screenplay written by Annabelle writer Gary Dauberman. Peter Safran and James Wan, who produced the first Annabelle film, also produced the new one.
The trailer for Annabelle: Creation suggests that the new film will offer much of the formulaic yet crowd-pleasing horror we saw in the previous Conjuring films: jump scares, seriously creepy subject matter, and maybe even a little body horror.
