Annabelle: Creation director David F. Sandberg’s horror inspirations and how he brings fresh twists to the genre
Hollywood outsider David F. Sandberg, who shot to fame with YouTube video short Lights Out, says he was determined to make creepy doll origin story look fresh, but says he took cues from The Haunting and The Shining
Kids do the strangest things in horror films. They go into rooms they are specifically told to stay away from. They skulk around creepy houses at night. They jab at potentially demonic scarecrows.
The kids in Annabelle: Creation do all of the above. The results, inevitably, are not in their favour.
The new film is an offshoot of the universe from The Conjuring, which was based on a real-life story about a haunted house in the US state of Rhode Island and features a possessed doll named Annabelle. The film is again produced by Peter Safran and horror film maestro James Wan, respectively the series’ long-time producer and creative mastermind.
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This latest instalment, which opens in a small American town in the mid 1940s, delves into how Annabelle came into being. Along the way, there is a group of orphaned girls seeking a home, a couple devastated by a tragedy that took place years earlier – and plenty of things that go bump in the night.
This follow-up to 2014’s Annabelle was directed by David F. Sandberg, the Swedish-born filmmaker who has long been captivated by the horror genre; he remembers, as a 10-year-old, convincing his mother to get the guy in the video rental shop to let him check out scary films.
“I started early with A Nightmare on Elm Street,” says Sandberg. “I’m sure it was a bit of that forbidden thing – these were movies for grown-ups that I wasn’t supposed to see. But that [fascination] stuck around, even though they are not forbidden for me any more.”