In 2021, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, the long-awaited third film of the hit Conjuring movie franchise debuted. Written by Rex Ogle and The Devil Made Me Do It‘s screenwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, The Conjuring: The Lover expands on one of the film’s most tragic characters, Jessica Louise Strong, and the origin of her association with an insidious curse. Joined by fan-favorite artist Garry Brown, the five-issue miniseries provides a fresh, expansive perspective for the franchise and adds to DC Horror’s growing line.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Johnson-McGoldrick and Ogle discussed bringing the franchise to comics, explained how they kept audiences on their toes after the revelations from The Devil Made Me Do It, and praised Brown and editor Katie Kubert for seeing the miniseries through to its impressive conclusion. Also included with this interview are the standard covers for the comic’s first four issues, illustrated by superstar artist Bill Sienkiewicz.
David, when you were sitting down to write The Devil Made Me Do It, did you always have the tragic backstory for Jessica in The Lover in your back pocket?
David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick: Yeah! It was something that was, as a writer, really painful for me to know that I was never going to be able to tell those stories. It was something where we needed to see how the curse played out and understand the threat. We needed to be able to see the beginning, middle, and end of what was the witch’s intent in the film so we came up with this story of Jessica. By the nature of it, it had to be a flashback, and the stuff that we went into, we didn’t have a lot of real-estate for. The whole time I was thinking that I hated to invent these characters just to kill them. They literally just walk onto the screen and an anvil falls on their head, basically.
When they approached if I had any ideas for a Conjuring comic book, I was like, “Oh my god! I am desperate to tell this story because I really wanted to drill into it!” We didn’t really have all the details of it, for sure. Rex really fleshed that out for us but that desire to tell the story of those two girls was always in the back of my mind.
Rex, as a fan of this franchise, how has it been able to work with David and play in The Conjuring Universe?
Rex Ogle: It’s been absolutely amazing! I remember when I saw the first Conjuring in the movie theater and I was totally blown away. My niece and nephew are huge fans of horror movies, like myself, so they were the ones who told me to go see it originally. Afterward, I couldn’t wait to just talk to them about it. When I got the opportunity to do this, I absolutely jumped at it because I was so stoked about it. It’s really fun getting to play in that universe and tell a new, original story.
The last time we spoke, you mentioned Garry Brown’s artwork has a dark, shadowy quality to it. How was it seeing those pages come in and writing towards his artistic strengths?
Ogle: It was one of those amazing things where I saw his artwork in an issue of X-Force before and thought his artwork was really cool and so expressive. When [editor Katie Kubert] threw out his name, I was like, “Seriously?!” He went above and beyond. He has this way where the action is great, the gore is great and it’s really a nice throwback to horror comics I read growing up.
What do you find creatively and uniquely fulfilling about storytelling in the comic book format?
Ogle: For me, it’s just being able to get into the nitty-gritty and pacing is very much like the horror movies where it’s like a slow roll. David was really good at getting me to slow down because I wanted to action it up and he wanted to slow it down and really drag out that tension and build that.
In a way, we already know the ending to Jessica’s story before the comic story begins. How was it working with that roadmap in place and subverting expectations based on that?
Johnson-McGoldrick: It’s sort of the trick of a lot of franchise movies… We’ve seen twenty James Bond movies and we know that James Bond isn’t going to die. The job is how do you get us to forget that for a little while and get to the edge of our seats — even though we know for a fact that everything is going to work out.
What Rex did, in terms of what he brought to Jessica’s character, is the opposite: we know she’s going to die but we get sucked into her story and plight and we identify with her as she’s lost in this place and you sympathize with her. You wind up liking her so much. You don’t want her to die. It’s more about getting into that character and making us forget that we actually already know the end of the story.
This is a case where Ed and Lorraine Warren aren’t there to save the day; but, to get a little more macro, is horror more effective when it doesn’t have that happy ending where everything is going to be okay?
Johnson-McGoldrick: One of the things I definitely feel like the film franchise of The Conjuring has done is shown us that both work. The three movies where Ed and Lorraine show up have happy endings and all four where they don’t are all downers. It’s wins and losses.
It also depends where you feel like your protagonist is, because, on some level in movies like The Nun or Annabelle, you’re rooting for the bad guy and how they’re going to win this and how they’re going to do their next kill. You flip it around and you have Ed and Lorraine as the protagonists, you don’t want anything to happen to them and have a different kind of fear. You’re rooting for different things to happen. It’s all your perception of where you’re entering the movie. Are you identifying with the kids running away from the killer or are you wishing you had a chainsaw? That’s how it gets decided!
Ogle: I can’t decide which I like more!
I think when I’m watching a movie and I don’t know how it’s going to end and there’s a bad ending, that’s more upsetting. When there’s a good ending, there’s a sense of relief. There’s something about not knowing that’s great because that’s how life is: you don’t know how things are going to turn out. In knowing something bad is going to happen to Jessica, I wanted the reader to hope against hope that she could find some way out of it but, at the end of the day, she didn’t. That’s just life and I feel like life can be just as scary as any horror movie.
Johnson-McGoldrick: That’s actually one thing that I think horror has the opportunity to do over any genre and does more. You don’t have to pull your punch. If you don’t want your heroes to make it through, you don’t have to. That gives you a different cathartic experience. You leave the theater shook up sometimes. In a way that in another genre of film, you might feel let down by that ending. With horror, you’re there for it and it’s a genre where it’s a safe place to go dark and not pull your punches. The last issue that Rex did, it’s a sucker punch, it’s rough. When the end finally comes, you’re like, “Goddamn it!” [laughs]
If Garry is the third Beatle — you can assign which of you are John, George, Ringo, and Paul — the fourth Beatle is Katie Kubert. How was it working with her on this?
Ogle: Katie was awesome! She hired us and she’s also a huge fan of horror and spoke the same language as us. We were able to reference Junji Ito and certain horror movies and she knew exactly what we were talking about — we were using the same vocabulary, which really made our jobs easier.
Johnson-McGoldrick: She’s obviously an expert in her world and I was new to it. She was corralling everything and putting it all together and making sure we’re all on track with the business and horror sides of it. I was really grateful for my first go-around in comics to have her at the helm.
Has this excited you about the possibility of working more in this medium?
Johnson-McGoldrick: It has because not every idea you have is a movie. There’s been a lot of times where I’ll go, “That’s really cool but too bad I can’t do anything with it.”Bbut this feels like something I’d like to explore more in the future, for sure, because I’ve always been a big comic book fan, especially horror comics. Getting to work on this one was fantastic!
Ogle: And there are no budget restrictions either! [laughs]
Johnson-McGoldrick: That’s true! That’s the other thing, your imagination is the limit. Film is free for me to write it, but past that, you have to figure out how to make it where. With comics, it costs the same to print whatever is on the page. [laughs]
Now that all these Conjuring movies, including The Devil Made Me Do It, are on the shelf, what are you proud and excited about The Lover getting to be alongside them?
Johnson-McGoldrick: What was interesting to me when I first got the call about this was that I grew up a fanboy and consumer. When I love something, I want to explore it in a lot of different ways. I would get toys, novels, and comics and explore this world in whatever form it took and see how the form changed the story or was able to tell different kinds of stories. The thing that was the most exciting for me about this was, for the first time, getting The Conjuring off the big screen and putting it in a comic book expanding the universe in a new way that fans hadn’t had a chance to see before.
Ogle: It was so fun to work on and visit that universe that I hope the fans enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed creating it. Hopefully, there’ll be more in the future!
Written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Rex Ogle and illustrated by Rex Ogle, The Conjuring: The Lover #5 is on sale now from DC Comics.
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