BACK TO BASICS (THE CONJURING)

I've never been much of a horror buff but I know a good scary movie when I see one.

In the early days of VHS, I recall kids in school jabbering excitedly about 'The Omen' and 'The Exorcist' and thinking it was far too early either for them or me to see it.

Eventually, when I did see classics like John Carpenter's 'Halloween' (at a friend's birthday party) and Richard Donner's 'The Omen' (on UTV), I was rattled but impressed.

But they did not, in my view, measure up to the heights of Spielberg's frightfest 'Jaws' or Hitchcock's 'The Birds'.

Horror movies have enjoyed enduring popularity ever since the great illusionist, George Melies donned a devil suit to play Mephistopheles in 1896 and began 'Le Manoir du Diable' ('The Haunted Castle') with a bat flying on the screen.

The genre really hit its stride with the German expressionist filmmakers and, in particular, Robert Wiene's 1920 chiller 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' and F W Murnau's groundbreaking 1922 vampire flick, 'Nosferatu'.

Around the same time in Hollywood, Lon Chaney became the first proper horror movie star with a series of films from Wallace Worseley's 1922 adaptation of 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' and Roland West's 1925 comedy horror movie 'The Monster' to Rupert Julian's 1925 version of 'The Phantom of the Opera'.

With the advent of talkies, directors like James Whale and stars like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi scared audiences by stretching the possibilities of sight and sound with their Frankenstein and Dracula movies.

And in subsequent years,  Michael Powell's 'Peeping Tom' and Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' delivered the first slasher movies in 1960.

Hitchcock three years later broke further ground by subverting nature, with his menacing take on Daphne du Maurier's 'The Birds'.

Zombie movies got a contemporary twist with George A Romero's hugely influential and very clever 1968 hit 'Night of the Living Dead'.

In the 1970s, Wes Craven & Tobe Hooper pushed audiences' tolerance for gory violence with the cannibal pic 'The Hills Have Eyes' and the graphic slasher movie, 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'.

Brian de Palma pushed the boundaries and landed Oscar nominations for Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie with his stunning version of Stephen King's 'Carrie' about a girl who is initially treated as an outcast but unleashes telekinetic powers to devastating effect.

Steven Spielberg built on Hitchcock's legacy and petrified audiences with his blockbuster 'Jaws', while Ridley Scott would bring the horror genre into space with the tense monster movie 'Alien', while Stanley Kubrick's entry into the horror genre was his brilliantly creepy take on Stephen King's 'The Shining' in 1980.

In recent years, Daniel Myrick and Eduoardo Sanchez helped popularise the fictional found footage film with the 'The Blair Witch Project' in 1999 and so-called torture porn movies (with their emphasis on slow, painful deaths) like Eli Roth's 'Hostel' series and James Wan's 'Saw' have reaped huge box office returns.

Arguably, the most terrifying horror genre, however, has been the Satanic movie.

Roman Polanski's 1968 classic 'Rosemary's Baby' was the first to popularise this kind of film but the genre reached its high watermark with William Friedkin's 'The Exorcist' in 1973 and continued to draw audiences with Richard Donner's 'The Omen' with Lee Remick, Gregory Peck, David Warner and Billie Whitelaw three years later.

This type of horror movie taps into age old fears about demonic possession, witches and the battle between God and the Devil or good versus evil.

'The Exorcist', in particular, is a superbly crafted work that 40 years later stillshakes audiences to their core.

Now, director James Wan gives us his take on the Satanic horror movie with 'The Conjuring' - a film that is fast becoming one of the box office sensations of the summer.

Based on a true story, Wan's film focuses on two New England paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warrington (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) who are often asked to determine whether houses are really haunted and objects are possessed.

It begins with the Warringtons telling the terrifying story of a possessed doll which they have kept locked up in a glass cabinet in a macabre room of grim artefacts in their home from all the terrible cases they have encountered.

The couple are called to a dilapidated farmhouse in Rhode Island when trucker, Roger Perron (Ron Livingston), his wife Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and their five daughters Andrea (Shanley Caswell), Nancy (Hayley McFarland), Christine (Joey King), Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) and April (Kyla Deaver) start to encounter a series of creepy events.

After April discovers a music box and the girls accidentally stumble upon a hidden cellar during a game of hide and seek, the family's dog is killed, birds start to regularly slam into the side of the house, bruises start to mysteriously appear on Carolyn's body and April, the youngest child, starts to converse with a boy who appears every time she plays the music box.

Carolyn calls in the Warrens when events really start to spiral out of control to the point that the children and their parents can no longer sleep in their bedrooms.

Ed Warrington is reluctant to take up the case - his reservations stemming from the realisation that each case exacts a heavy toll on his clairvoyant wife. During the last case which resulted in an exorcism, Lorraine saw something so terrifying she locked herself up in her bedroom for eight days without food.

However Lorraine persuades him to assist the Perrons and they soon discover a series of sinister events have occurred in the area where the house is situated. 

These were triggered by a witch Bathsheba who was caught trying to sacrifice her infant son and then hung herself from a tree, declaring her love for Satan and cursing anyone who in the future occupied the land.

The Warringtons are convinced the house is demonically possessed and requires an exorcism but the problem is, they need a special dispensation from the Vatican to allow Father Gordan (Steve Coulter) to perform it as the Perrons are not Catholics.

James Wan's 'The Conjuring' is very much an old school horror film and, interestingly, that is its greatest strength.

Made on a modest budget of $20 million, it deliberately summons up memories of 'The Exorcist' and, in particular, another movie based on a real life Warringtons case, Stuart Rosenberg's 1979 smash hit 'The Amityville Horror' with Rod Steiger.

Doors and floorboards creak, clapping suddenly becomes really sinister, clocks stop ticking at 3.08am and birds thud against the walls of the house.

As Wan and his editor Kirk M Morri expertly ratchet up the tension, John R Leonotti's camera creeps around the house - sometimes with point of view shots and other times around the characters.

In one sequence, when Christine is woken up by a sudden tug on her leg and realises it is not her sister, Leonotti's camera performs a breathtaking 180 degree twist as she peers under her bed only to raise herself up and notice something petrifying behind the bedroom door.

Wan and his screenwriters, Chad and Carey Hayes deliver a taut script that seizes their audience with dread from the off and they never really relax their grip.

This is a movie where everyone involved has brought their A game. The performances are note perfect - Livingston and Taylor are hugely sympathetic as the bewildered and terrified couple whose dream home has turned into a nightmare and the children are very natural.

Shannon Kook as Drew and John Brotherton as Brad make engaging sidekicks for the Warringtons but the beating heart of the film belongs to Farmiga (who impressed in Martin Scorsese's 'The Departed' and Jason Reitman's 'Up In The Air') and Wilson. They provide a steady presence in a movie amid the chaos swirling around them.

In a summer of bombastic superhero blockbusters made on huge budgets, it is oddly comforting that an old school horror film, made for significantly less, packs a far greater punch.

Not for the faint hearted, 'The Conjuring' is well worth a visit to your multiplex and it is good to see Wan also prove he is not a torture porn one trick pony.

('The Conjuring' opens in the Movie House and other UK and Ireland cinemas on August 1, 2013. This review originally appeared on Eamonnmallie.com)