Joshua Schulze recently published the chapter "James Wan’s Dead Space:The Conjuring films, Siegfried Kracauer and the Revenge of Physical Reality" in the book The Cinema of James Wan: Critical Essays (eds. Matthew Edwards and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (McFarland, 2022).
An auteur and the creator of multiple cinematic universes, James Wan has become one of the most successful directors in history, his films breaking box office records worldwide. Yet there is little scholarship on Wan's work. This collection of new essays fills the gap with contributions from around the globe offering analysis of his film and television productions,
Schulze's chapter analyzes how the use of dead space in The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 works to decenter the human characters, while also considering the ecological implications of this through the lens of Kracauer’s film theory.
