THE FINAL CHAPTER

Director Michael Chaves focuses on the emotional journey of the Warren family in The Conjuring: Last Rites

- STORY: TATAT BUNNAG

The Conjuring: Last Rites opened in cinemas as a powerful, spine-chilling final chapter in a franchise built on real events.

Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson return as Ed and Lorraine Warren, now facing not just demons from beyond but tension from within their own family — particularly through their daughter Judy, played by Mia Tomlinson.

The film promised an emotional weight alongside supernatural scares and from the earliest announcements, director and executive producer Michael Chaves set out to deliver just that.

From his first conversations with James Wan and Peter Safran, Chaves said they “saw The Conjuring: Last Rites as something that would bring to a close this journey of Ed and Lorraine Warren’, and they asked: “How can we land this with as much emotional impact as possible, while delivering all the scares you've come to expect?”

Chaves recalled that after sketching out a strong script, the question became how to open the film so that everything felt full circle.

“If this film is going to be about endings, we should think about the beginning. We need to make it feel like it’s coming full circle,’ he said, and he pitched that Last Rites begin with one of the first cases the Warrens ever handled —and at the same time mark Judy’s birth. It was a night meant to reveal both the genesis of their family and the origin of their greatest vulnerability.

“I wanted this opening scene to be the darkest thing we've seen in the series,’ he said. So that viewers would be immediately reminded that the Warrens’ greatest horror had always been what they loved most.