How Annabelle Comes Home Fits into The Conjuring Universe

Director Gary Dauberman and stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson share their thoughts on Annabelle, the Warrens and more.

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return to the roles of real-life demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren in Annabelle Comes Home, the third movie in the Annabelle series that is itself a spin-off of The Conjuring movies, in which Wilson and Farmiga first played the parts of the courageous yet faith-inspired paranormal investigators and exorcists.

Although the Warrens mainly bookend the new film — which is centered about their daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace) and two friends as they battle the hideously evil title doll — Farmiga tells us in the video interview below that it’s fun to slip back into Lorraine’s skin: “The danger is to get too comfortable in these roles,” says the actress. “But Lorraine — even the little time we spend with Lorraine, her presence is so formidable and so specific, that just always stays with me.”

Read More: The Conjuring Timeline Explained

Wilson, who unlike Farmiga never got to meet the real-life person he is playing, adds, “Each time we play these characters…I can’t say I watch full movies, but I’ll go back and watch the first Conjuring, Conjuring 2, the same YouTube videos of (Ed) — I do have to keep doing that, because the one thing we don’t do, as much fun as we have, we don’t rest on the performances. You want to push yourself as an actor, but you also want to push the character.”

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“We explored the back story of Annabelle in Annabelle: Creation,” says Gary Dauberman, who has written all the Annabelle movies in addition to making his debut as a director on this one. “I thought the best way to approach this movie was something I really wanted to explore, the character of Judy Warren — who we’ve seen in other movies, but haven’t yet learned what it would be like to be the daughter of Ed and Lorraine Warren, which is something I thought a lot about and talked with the actual Judy about.”

As for why Annabelle — who was introduced early on as the centerpiece of the Warrens’ eerie home museum of haunted artifacts before getting her own movies — continues to spark the imaginations of Dauberman and Annabelle Comes Home producer James Wan, the former has an explanation.

“I think what we like about her is that we get to explore different types of scares, different kinds of horror within the story of Annabelle, and really the Warrens at large and all their case files,” Dauberman says. “So it never feels like we’re running into a dead end because there’s a new place to go or a new case to uncover.”

Annabelle Comes Home is out in theaters now.

Don Kaye is a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist and associate editor of Den of Geek. Other current and past outlets include Syfy, United Stations Radio Networks, Fandango, MSN, RollingStone.com and many more. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @donkaye