The Conjuring: Last Rites—How America Exported Demons and Called It Soft Power
The Conjuring: Last Rites—A Global Séance in Dolby Atmos
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic
The trailer dropped at 3 a.m. in Manila, 9 p.m. in Paris, and just in time for the Lagos rush hour, which means Warner Bros. has finally synchronized humanity’s circadian rhythms around the only thing we still agree on: a jump scare and a bucket of popcorn. The Conjuring: Last Rites, the fourth (or fifth, depending on whether you count the Nun’s gap year) installment in the mainline franchise, arrives this autumn like a diplomatic summit—except the participants are a haunted farm house, a crucifix, and Vera Farmiga’s increasingly exhausted eyebrows.
From a purely geopolitical standpoint, Last Rites is the cinematic equivalent of NATO expansion: every new sequel annexes another corner of the globe. The film is set in upstate New York, but Netflix has already pre-sold it in 190 territories, including Vatican City—where, rumor has it, the Pope requested a private screening to fact-check the Latin. Meanwhile, China’s censors are reportedly trimming three seconds of demonic tongue to preserve socialist harmony, a length of time roughly equal to the average attention span on TikTok.
International audiences, bless their algorithm-addled hearts, now treat the Warrens’ case files the way prior generations treated UNESCO heritage sites: they queue politely, snap selfies with the possessed, and leave glowing reviews in 17 languages. In São Paulo, a pop-up escape room recreates the Perron farmhouse so convincingly that local police were called when a tourist refused to leave the wardrobe. In Seoul, a fried-chicken chain is offering a “Demonic Wings” combo—extra spicy, served with a side of holy water (sparkling). Somewhere in all of this, Ed and Lorraine Warren’s original mission to document evil has been franchised harder than Starbucks.
Yet beneath the popcorn-scented cynicism lies a darker truth: Last Rites is the first Conjuring chapter written and filmed during the post-pandemic hangover, and the metaphors practically sign their own NDAs. A virus nobody can see, an invisible enemy that pits family against family—sound familiar? Warner Bros. executives insist the script was locked in 2019, but it’s hard not to notice the demon’s preferred method of transmission is close contact and whispered misinformation. One scene reportedly features an exorcism conducted over Zoom—latency issues cause the demon to freeze mid-possession, giving the victim just enough time to mute himself and pretend the Wi-Fi dropped. If that isn’t the most honest depiction of modern evil, I don’t know what is.
The global supply chain of dread also deserves scrutiny. Latin incantations are voiced by a Kenyan voice actor, the crucifixes are 3-D-printed in Shenzhen, and the fog machines run on the same chemicals used to disinfect meatpacking plants. Even the demons outsource now. Meanwhile, international box-office projections are bullish: analysts predict $400 million worldwide, enough to fund a small exorcism program—or, more realistically, another sequel. The studio has already trademarked The Conjuring: Subprime Mortgages, should they ever run out of haunted real estate.
And yet, for all the cynicism, Last Rites lands at a moment when half the planet is renegotiating the terms of reality itself. From Kyiv to Khartoum, people are dodging actual horrors, so perhaps it’s comforting to watch a tidy American couple banish evil with a rosary and a catchphrase. The film offers the same transactional absolution as a carbon offset: two hours in the dark, one Hail Mary, and you’re forgiven for doom-scrolling through war crimes on the train ride home.
International significance? Simple. The Conjuring universe is now the most reliable export America has left—cheaper than weapons, less embarrassing than democracy. Every ticket sold is a tiny trade surplus, every scream a soft-power dividend. And if the demon wins in the end, well, that’s just the global balance of terror keeping things interesting.
Lights up. Cue the end credits, translated into 47 languages, each one promising the same reassuring lie: “Based on a true story.” Because in 2024, the only thing more contagious than fear is the need to believe it happened to someone else.
