The Nun 2 is releasing in theaters soon, and we’ll soon be able to join Valak and Sister Irene in another hellish adventure. One thing I’m sure fans of the first film are eager to know more about is what kind of scares we’ll get this time. After all, we are nine films deep into The Conjuring universe, and in need of some fresh ways to dole out the thrills and chills.
In an interview with Collider, director Michael Chaves was asked about what he felt he couldn’t have achieved with The Nun 2 without his previous experience on The Curse of La Llorona and The Conjuring 3, and he specifically points to a scene he dubs the newsstand sequence.
Chaves goes on to describe what the concept behind the scene is, and details some of the ideas he and the crew had in how to execute it. But the reason Chaves says it nearly broke him has nothing to do with how terrifying it was, but rather how much of a nightmare it was trying to make it work.
”I was looking at all this street photography from France in the ‘50s, and there was, I think it was René Maltête, he’s a French photographer, and he’d do this visual kind of trickery with his photos, but it was all in camera, and I just thought it would be cool if the Nun was manifesting in the environment. He explains, before continuing to open up more of the idea.
And then I would see these old newsstands, and so I had this idea. I was like, ‘I want the Nun to appear within a newsstand.’ And I was thinking, ‘Maybe it’s like a flip book. Maybe it’s like each magazine is like a flip book, and then it’s a collage, and they’re all kind of coming together.”’
Issues With Creating The Nun 2’s Biggest Scare
So what caused Chaves so much stress?
”Everybody was like, ‘How are we gonna do that?’ I thought, ‘Well, we should just do it all in camera. We should print all these magazines and then mechanically rig them all to turn, and we blow some with wind, and then some of them are a little bit more controlled.’ And that got us, like, 50% of the way there.”
Unfortunately, it went a bit downhill from there.
”But then some of the mechanical rigging would break, and we were shooting at night. It was like the whole thing was falling apart. It’s like, ‘This will never work!’ So there was some visual effects supplementing it in the end. But it was really a beast. I mean, just from how it would manifest. It was trickier than it looks. [Laughs]”
Chaves then discusses how he approaches scares in the interview with Perri Nemiroff, and also talks about having respect for the audience, Ridley Scott Easter Eggs, and the relationship between Taissa Farmiga‘s Sister Irene and Jonas Bloquet’s Frenchie. You can read the full interview here.
The Nun 2 will be released in theaters September 8, 2023.
