Vera Farmiga and Demonologist Lorraine Warren on 'The Conjuring,' God and Personal Demonic Attacks
Actress and director Vera Farmiga portrays famed demonologist Lorraine Warren in the summer horror smash "The Conjuring."
Farmiga and Warren worked closely together while filming the movie. The two of them sat down for a roundtable discussion and revealed some interesting encounters with the supernatural while they were in the process of creating this film that tells the story of the Perron family and how Lorraine and her husband helped them during a time where the demonic manifested in their home.
"The case is of a haunted house in Rhode Island where there was 6 children living there and the father had a job in New York City so he wasn't coming home every night," said Warren to reporters. "There were very bad things going on in that house."
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Warren explained her real life experiences with the Perron home and described the evil presence she and her husband Ed encountered there. They arrived at the family's house and Lorraine had walked down the stairs to a dirt cellar located in the lower part to meet with her husband when he told her to go back upstairs.
"As I walked up the stairs there was one room not lit up at all and I looked and I thought, did I see that?" she said. "There was this glow and I blessed myself not knowing if it was good bad or indifferent and I realized it was not good. The woman of the house brought me into the bedroom and I sat on the bed and it raised up with me on it and I thought hmmm.. this is going to be an interesting case."
Farmiga told reporters she admired Lorraine's compassion and aimed to capture her true essence while portraying her in "The Conjuring." Warren is allegedly clairvoyant and Farmiga hoped to convey that to the audience in a way that was believable and honest.
"I can't obsess over being Lorraine Warren," said Farmiga to reporters. "I can only try to capture the beautiful qualities that she possesses. I'm just looking at her human qualities she possesses. How I was going to achieve clairvoyance or convey that is something that I had to figure out. So for me I break it down. Physically what you're going to see is my eyes. They are the window to the soul."
She describes Warren's gaze and how she tried to capture it along with her eccentric style and smile. Her main research on Lorraine's work came from a book titled The Demonologist that touches on mystical theology and her vocation for policing the supernatural evils of this world. Farmiga also discussed some unusual activity she encountered shortly after she took the role in "The Conjuring."
"[The project] began and ended with the same kind of weird signal that came my way," she said. "James [Wan] and I had a creative conversation of whether I was going to take the role and at the end of it I said if Patrick [Wilson] is in I'm in. And I open my computer and there's these claw marks across it."
After they finished shooting "The Conjuring," a similar incident occurred.
"After we got back from North Carolina where we filmed, the next night I woke up in my bed and the same claw marks appeared on my thigh," she said.
Farmiga took a picture of these marks and showed them to reporters present during the discussion. Lorraine advised her to bless herself with holy water as she passed her iPhone around to show the marks.
"I was cool with it. I felt fortified by my own faith. My prayers were to just dissipate that thing that was trying to scare me and intimidate me," replied Farmiga to a concerned Warren.
The actress also discussed the role her faith and background played in her portrayal of Warren.
"If you haven't quite solidified your concept of God, you have to have a great admiration for people who do," she said directly to The Christian Post. "What's most important is that I honored and understood where [Lorraine] was coming from."
Farmiga was raised Roman Catholic so she says she comes from a Christian perspective when it comes to her perception of God. To her, "The Conjuring" is a movie that will challenge people in their belief systems.
"The movie is challenging your notions of what God and Satan mean to you," she said. "Whether you think God is a guy with a beard in the sky or if you think God is love. It challenges your belief or lack thereof."
"The Conjuring" is now in theaters.
