Conjuring the Beyond
Unemployed, divorced, suffering from anxiety and depression and living with her brother and his wife whom she conspicuously avoids, Wanda Fulcia sees an opportunity to get a few days away and make some quick cash by volunteering to participate in the sleep study being performed by Doctor Richard Pretorious, perhaps finding her feet and starting a new chapter in her life.
Taking the keys to their car and sneaking out with her suitcase and making the journey to the high school buildings of Mineral, Washington, Wanda’s fellow subjects Theo, Porter and Gloria have little in common; what is important is what Doctor Pretorious wishes to do with them, hypnotising them collectively to see if he can invoke sleep paralysis, a subject with which he is already familiar.
Written and directed by Calvin Morie McCarthy, to say Conjuring the Beyond is an improvement on An Amityville Poltergeist is a compliment which should be understood in the intended context; like that film it is focused on disturbances of sleep, specifically the semi-conscious state of sleep paralysis where the body is frozen but the mind is active, ironic in a film capable of inducing a catatonic state.
Lifting scenes and dialogue directly from The Haunting – Wanda’s argument with her family which whom she resides, stealing their car, a character named Theo, an erratic psychic within the group, jokes about embalming rooms – the cast is led by Victoria Grace Borrello as Wanda, apparently incapable of nuance or inflection in her persistently infuriated delivery, though at least unlike Steve Larkin’s Doctor Pretorious (presumably named for the creator of the Bride of Frankenstein) she is able to memorise her lines and pronounce them.
Spouting gibberish with the smug certainty of an internet conspiracy theorist rather than the assurance of a professional scientist engaged in research, smoking and drinking with his test subjects whom he allows to collude before documenting their experiences, his attempt to dismiss the predictable similarity of their reported nightmares as folie à deux (“fawally ahdew”) is representative of his dubious competence.
“A sample size such as this really tells us nothing,” Pretorious explains to his three remaining subjects when not struggling to read his lines from the page, Theo having vanished after screams were heard in the night which everyone heard yet nobody investigated, raising the question of why Pretorious, his suffering subjects and the audience continue Conjuring the Beyond to a cop-out conclusion perhaps signalled by the creeping “sleep demon” which resembles nothing so much as the Wicked Witch of the West on a shoestring budget.
Conjuring the Beyond is available on digital download now
