What spooked the cast of The Conjuring for real?

About a third into a screening of the horror film The Conjuring — in the thick of a terrifying scene that will forever rule out the possibility of me investing in any sort of real estate involving old houses with dark basements — a woman in her late 20s scrambled past me to flee the cinema.

“I’m sorry,” whispered her plus-one as he trailed behind her. “Someone’s really scared.”

She wasn’t the only one to skedaddle out of the darkness into brighter safety. About a dozen other hardnosed entertainment journos, most of whom have probably experienced their fair share of real-life horror — like interviewing Angelina Jolie — also bolted from their seats.

“Wow,” laughed The Conjuring director James Wan. “They’re chicken-s***, is what they are!”

Wan is the Malaysia-born, Australia-raised director behind spooktacular flicks like Insidious and the original Saw movie. And the man loves his job.

“That’s my favourite thing about making these movies: Watching people watch the film. I’ll just pop my head in and watch people squirm or slide down in their seats. I love that,” he smiled. “It’s good. I like that kind of sadism!”

With The Conjuring, Wan has hit the sadism jackpot. It is the scariest movie of the year. The film was given an R-rating in the United States (NC16 in Singapore) — despite its lack of blood and violence. It’s that creepy. And to top it all off — cue the ominous music — it’s based on a true story.

TRUTH IS SPOOKIER THAN FICTION

It’s 1971. The Perron family — Dad Roger (Ron Livingston), mom Carolyn (Lily Taylor) and their five daughters — moves into an old farmhouse in Rhode Island. Very soon, things go bump in the night, mysterious bruises start to appear, and it becomes clear that all is not right with the property. Desperate for help, The Perrons reach out to “demonologists” Ed and Lorrain Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) to protect their family.

The Warrens would go on to become noted for their investigations into the paranormal, claiming to have worked on over 10,000 cases, including that one in Amityville, Long Island. But their experience with the Perrons, a sustained haunting that went on for 10 years in real life — although it’s been condensed into a span of a few months for this 112-minute movie — would remain one of the Warrens’ most terrifying encounters.

Sceptics and non-believers will pooh-pooh all of this as mystical mumbo-jumbo. The real Perron family and Lorraine (husband Ed passed away in 2006) maintain their side of the story until this day. The film-makers of The Conjuring, of course, say the supernatural world is very, very real.

Carey and Chad Hayes are the identical twin-brother writing duo behind the film, and they received validation from a most unlikely source.

“Warner Bros did a screening (of The Conjuring) for the clergy in LA,” said Carey. “Chad and I were on a panel last week for something else and this priest walked up to me and said, ‘You don’t know me, but I watched your movie and I want to thank you guys for getting it right.’”

But the 86-year-old Warren, a clairvoyant who first discovered her gifts at age seven, can one-up them: She has a priest living in her house. It is something she’s thankful for, considering her house is home to the Museum Of The Occult, a treasure trove of dark artefacts from the Warrens’ numerous investigations, including a possessed doll named Annabelle, which features prominently in The Conjuring.

“I don’t go into the museum,” said Warren. “I have a Catholic priest living in my home. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

If one was to assume all this talk about ghosts and demons were real, how much of what we see in The Conjuring actually happened? “I’d say most of it, to be honest with you,” said Chad. “Because it took place over a long time (in real life) and you can’t do that in a movie, what we did was take the scares and construct the story around the scares.

“It was terrifying because we met the real Perrons. Those girls came out to the set and one of them completely freaked out, collapsed to the ground. She was so scared.”

“You just see it in their eyes. You just see that something really terrifying and bad happened to them,” said Carey. “We took the responsibility of keeping it truthful. Andrea, the oldest daughter, sent us a really lovely note saying, ‘You guys nailed it’.”

“It’s very real,” said Warren about how the film represents what happened in 1971. “Very real.”

So real, in fact, the scares crossed over to real life.

SOMETHING DIABOLICAL THIS WAY COMES

“My son worked on the movie,” said Chad. “We recreated the artefacts room. He was the low man on the totem pole of the camera crew. He was in there winding up this cable … and suddenly he heard this spinning noise. He turned around and there was a little brass cymbal on the shelf that he saw spinning, and it dropped to the floor and went faster and faster. It completely freaked him out. He came running out and he told (his boss), ‘I’m never going in there again’!”

“When Lorraine first got on the set, she said there was something there that really shouldn’t be there,” said Carey, “And James said, ‘But we built the house with all new lumber.’ And she said, ‘But you decorated the house with antiques.’ And there are things that attach themselves to objects.”

Oscar-nominated actress Vera Farmiga (Up In The Air, Bates Motel) found herself inexplicably waking up at 3.07 every morning — the same time characters in the film get the heebie-jeebies.

“I still wake up at (that time),” said the 39-year-old, matter-of-factly. “I think it is my own psychic alarm clock. It’s almost funny now. Like, I’ll wake up and it will be 3.07am: ‘Okay, time to take a tinkle’. I really don’t have any negative associations with that.”

Now, that is. “In the beginning, there was a fear that came along with that, that I had to pray away, that I had to repel with my own positivity,” added Farmiga.

EVERYBODY’S A SCEPTIC

Of course, not everyone who worked on the film is a believer. Take The Conjuring’s leading man Patrick Wilson, for example.

“I was invited a bunch of times to go visit the actual Perron house and the Warren house and I said, ‘No fing way,’” laughed Wan. “I was too terrified! But Patrick and Vera did! Vera did not want to go down into the haunted museum but Patrick did.

“One day, I was just hanging out with friends and I got this text message — and it’s a picture of Patrick (goofing off) next to the Annabelle doll! I was like, ‘Dude, that thing’s gonna latch on to you and go home with you’!”

“I was at a party and there was a guy talking about how he woke up one night and there were four spirits holding the corners of the sheets and they were shaking him up and down,” said fellow sceptic Ron Livingston. “And I said, ‘Well, okay, I must just be the wallflower of the spirit world because nobody has ever hung out with me’. And the moment I said that, the candelabra started rattling and shaking and the lights flickered on and off.”

But no, it wasn’t anything supernatural. “It was the Northridge earthquake,” he grinned.

Would he, however, want to know if his house were truly haunted? “I would want to know. And at the very least, I would want to charge rent. If you’re gonna stay here, you’re gonna do the dishes, you’re gonna cook once a week. We’re gonna work that out,” he said.

Still, the 46-year-old actor wasn’t about to take any chances. Just in case there’s any truth in this whole nonsense about spirits, he didn’t keep any mementos from the set.

“I usually do keep something, but not from this (movie). Props was just trying to give away that stuff,” he laughed.

We’ll probably never know which side of the paranormal debate is truly right. For Warren, however, that question has long been answered. What she wants to know is how her dearly departed husband Ed would have liked The Conjuring and its take on their life’s work.

“Sometimes I think he’s very close to me. Very, very, very close to me, I think he is,” she smiled. “Maybe I want to try to see if I could say to him, ‘Honey, what do you think about this movie? Because you’re not here now’.”

Whatever the answer, I’m guessing there won’t be many journalists waiting around to find out.

The Conjuring opens in cinemas on Aug 8, with sneak previews today.