How has the real Annabelle doll been spending her quarantine?
Maybe you’ve heard reports that the darling real-life doll Annabelle escaped from her fortress of solitude, and maybe-you-did-maybe-you-didn’t hear that this was disproved by the son-in-law of original curators Ed & Lorraine Warren. In a YouTube video filmed from inside the Warrens’ Occult Museum in Warren, CT, Tony Spera took the opportunity to confirm Annabelle is indeed safe inside her glass enclosure.
Even though these rumors about the infamous doll are false, it doesn’t mean the movie prop version (which looks nothing like the real Annabelle) isn’t up to her own quarantine shenanigans. Let’s take a look at some of the trouble she’s been causing ahead of the release of the latest addition to The Conjuring cinematic universe.
Some quarantine mischief
The Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, CA has been nothing short of a ghost town for the last four months since production shut down and everyone began working from home. The release of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It was initially slated for a September 11th, 2020 premiere, but has since been pushed back to June 4th, 2021. This has allowed creators plenty of time to . . . perfect their craft.
Apparently, someone left Annabelle behind in the empty offices and during a “work equipment pick-up day” three New Line employees decided to have some fun in the form of a short entitled Annabelle in Quarantine.
What began as an interoffice joke quickly found itself into the company newsletter – then made the jump to Twitter, where it dropped just in time for National Doll Day (which we’re sure you’re celebrating as hard as the Film Daily writers room).
Two of the employees mentioned wore masks and shot the movie on their iPhones while a third Facetimed in to direct remotely. In the short, Annabelle waits patiently for things to return to normal before snapping on Day 4 and beginning a reign of mischief. Some of her office antics include a jaunt in a VR headset, full-body Xerox copies, a candy coma on a pink couch, and a private screening of Annabelle Comes Home.
Annabelle: The Content Creation
Following the release of the video on August 1st, two weeks later Annabelle logged on to Twitter to conduct more trickery, this time with director Scott Derickson as her target. Best known for his work on Doctor Strange, Derrickson tweeted that the Crooked Man, another character from The Conjuring series, was a superior villain to our favorite possessed doll-turned-Twitter-sh&#-starter.
Derrickson, no stranger to the horror genre (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister), was hit with a reply from Annabelle: Creation director David F. Sandberg in the form of a horrifying GIF in which Annabelle stares at Derrickson’s tweet only to slowly turn her head to the camera with a menacing glance that can only mean trouble.
Derrickson replied to the tweet with the only possible answer – “Oh my gawd” – before logging off and presumably conducting a sage smudge cleanse of his house.
Doll parts
Annabelle first achieved mainstream success through The Conjuring series and has since gone on to inspire three standalone films: Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, and Annabelle Comes Home. But before that, Annabelle was a fixture at the Warrens’ Occult Museum along with many other pieces of haunted & disturbing items. And before that, she was striking real fear into the hearts of unsuspecting doll-owners.
In 1970, a young woman discovered that her Raggedy Ann Doll would move around the room when she was out. On one occasion, the doll even attacked her friend! Through a seance, the woman learned the doll was possessed by a murdered young girl named Annabel Higgins, on the hunt for a body to possess.
The Warrens exorcised the young woman’s house and brought the doll back to their museum, where she currently sits behind protective glass & holy water. Stories abound of visitors acting disrespectful towards the doll and having horrible things occur to them afterward. After thumping on Annabelle’s glass box, one man reportedly died in a motorcycle accident on the way home.
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Coincidence – or Courtney Love-approved vengeance? We don’t know, but we do know Annabelle Come Home & The Conjuring 2 are available to stream on HBOMax!
