It's the same concept here but effective enough for a low budget horror film.
We've seen it before in classic horror films ? young parents who must literally go through hell to save their child's soul.
On one hand, the look and feel in this film is a copy-paste version of Insidious, but concentrated with sporadic moments of numbing fright. Consultations with a librarian and a priest reveal far greater implications, thus leaving these young parents to ward off hell by going right through it. It takes a while to dawn on them that something has latched on to Annabelle, making the doll a conduit with increasing intent on harming them and their new born baby. It's a stock approach to crying wolf in horror movies.
At first Mia starts seeing things and becomes increasingly paralysed by fear while John begins to doubt her sanity. After surviving a horrific attack from a satanic cult, the Gordons have new guests that won't leave. Mia has a doll collection, one of which is the titular vintage doll gifted by her medical student husband John (Ward Horton). Playing the aforementioned mother is Annabelle Wallis (freaky coincidence?) as Mia Gordon. Leonetti plays it safe by treading down Wan's beaten path but without any surprises of his own. And is probably why cinematographer John R Leonetti of those preceding films is tasked with directorial duties in this film, while Wan himself is bumped up to producer. The scariest scenes in Annabelle are made up of these moments, and at times we are left guessing what lurks in the corners. While this tactic is nothing new to horror-thrillers, it works for the whole purpose of inducing dread, thick and slow, before the actual jolt hits a few seconds later. Without shifting focus from the mother and child, we see something or someone lurking in the hallway behind something that shouldn't be there in the first place. The scene is shot in the living room where the right half of the frame is composed of the mother and her baby and the left half is a hallway that leads to other rooms in the house. Consider a scene where a mother watches over her new born baby. By this I am referring to events occurring off-center, or in some corner of the screen that is oblivious to on-screen characters but very obvious to the viewer. One of the most important aspects of The Conjuring and older sibling Insidious (both films directed by James Wan), is the cinematography and how it wreaks havoc with the viewer's peripheral vision. But that's all you get, jumpy scenes done to perfection, with little or no atmosphere and a story that disintegrates before it reaches a satisfying conclusion. As a prequel and spin-off of The Conjuring ? 2013's highly effective horror film ? Annabelle does what it promises, even if it does so one jump and one jolt at a time.
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