Twelve years after the first The Conjuring movie, James Wan has also managed to be everywhere else while guiding the franchise well past $2 billion at the global box office. Wan found time to oversee the Saw movies while stepping away for both the Aquaman films and Teacup, but he always circles back to Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga). And now, it’s the “last” time for Wan, as producer, to dramatize a hellish case handled by the Warrens’ real-life counterparts.

This will be the tenth movie in a franchise that has included a trio of Annabelle flicks, The Curse of La Llorna, and a pair of The Nun movies about Valek. To prepare for The Conjuring: Last Rites, let’s grab the rosary beads and foresee what frights will come.

Plot

James Wan wrote the screenplay for this final installment that puts The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and The Nun II helmer Michael Chaves back in the director’s seat. After the first three movies tackled the Perron Family Haunting, the Entfield Poltergeist, and Arne Johnson’s murder defense strategy (which was not successful), the fourth movie will pick up a handful of years after the Warrens were last seen onscreen. At this point, they’ve “retired” from risking their lives to conduct exorcisms but are finding that speaking engagements aren’t paying the bills. So what next?

According to an Entertainment Weekly profile of Last Rites, that would be the Smurl family haunting, which took place in 1970s Pennsylvania, where “the Smurls, including their young daughters and Jack’s parents, claimed to experience supernatural occurrences ranging from strange odors and voices all the way to ghostly molestations.” Wilson opened up about how he wasn’t surprised that this case will close out Warrens’ run, and Farmiga weighed in:

“We’ve known about this one for a long time,” says Wilson, who watched many clips of those various TV appearances when he first started preparing to play Ed in The Conjuring 1. “Then writers are playing around with how it affects the family and what’s going on in the family’s life. That’s where we can really theatricalize it. We’re not making a documentary.”

“They’re going to witness a moment in the Warrens’ lives — and a pretty profound moment,” Farmiga says of the audience. “It’s a moment that makes time stand still. This one’s different than the others. The other three were about hauntings, and this one is about reckoning, in a way.”

The movie will also star Mia Tomlinson as Ed and Warren’s daughter, Judy, which might cause a few eyebrows to raise regarding if the torch will be passed to her. There have been no clues there, but James Wan previously told Collider, “With the Conjuring films, we are very precious about [them]. And so we kind of want to just take our time to make sure we get it right and to make sure the emotion of the Warren stories that we want to tell, and … we just want to make sure that it’s the right thing.” From the looks of the below trailer, cast and crew nailed the “right thing” for this probable finale.

Trailer

Past (The Nun, Annabelle) and “present” (and even more horrifying doll), it’s all here:

Cast

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga will take their final turns as Ed and Lorraine Warren. Also on tap? Madison Lawlor as Young Lorraine, Orion Smith as Young Ed, Mia Tomlinson as Judy Warren, and John Brotherton as Brad.

The cast further includes Molly Cartwright, Kate Fahy, Elliot Cowan, Beau Gadson, Rebecca Calder, and Ben Hardy.

Release Date

The Conjuring: Last Rites will haunt theaters on September 5.