YMMV / The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

• Complete Monster: Isla the Occultist, daughter of the priest Kastner, is a witch seeking to avoid her own deserved damnation. Summoning a demon and promising it a soul, Isla has an 8-year-old possessed in agony to corrupt his soul, only failing when the demon is taken into the body of his sister's boyfriend Arne whom Isla uses to commit murder. Having an innocent college girl possessed to murder her friend and kill herself, Isla then attempts to wipe out the Warren family, murdering her own father when he tries to help the Warrens and trying to finish her corruption of Arne by forcing his suicide. Isla then attempts to corrupt Ed Warren to murder his own wife with her demonic patron, intending on damning her victims as a price for her own soul.
• Moral Event Horizon: In order for her to complete a curse requiring three victims, Isla deliberately leaves a witch's totem on the grounds that the Glatzel family will eventually move in. Thus, she was the one responsible indirectly for David's possession and then the other deaths.
• Narm:
  • The movie's subtitle is outright giggle-inducing for anyone old enough to recall Geraldine's memorable Catchphrase from The Flip Wilson Show.
  • During the scene where Arne is mopping the floor of the infirmary, one of the sleeping prisoners (influenced by the demon) wakes up and..... recites the lyrics to Blondie's "Call Me" with deadly seriousness. Granted, the song was playing when Arne killed Bruno, but it's still a pretty silly moment in an otherwise serious film.
• Sequelitis: Agreed to be a step-down from the two previous mainline entries, with worse scares and a less interesting story and characters, excluding the returning Warrens.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • After the previous Conjuring movies managed to be effective horror films without indulging in gory violence or death (excluding one dog), this one does away with that concept to weaker results.
  • This film's plot goes away from the previously established formula for a supernatural investigation. While not a bad idea given the first two films were pretty similar, this causes the Warrens to be less attached to the victims and thus the movie doesn't have the same emotional core.
  • For those who don't believe the Warrens' accounts but simply enjoyed the prior films as haunted house stories, this film may have crossed a line by portraying Arne Johnson, who killed a man and served a fairly light sentence for it, as a sympathetic victim.
  • The characterizations of the Warrens themselves have drawn consternation; both were portrayed as intelligent in the previous films, but Ed has several borderline Too Dumb to Live moments involving his heart medication (some of which are called out In-Universe). Meanwhile, Lorraine's psychic powers have been elevated from empathy, hearing voices and prophetic dreams, letting her go on a full-on vision quest, which is far less grounded than the previous films.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga continue to deliver strong work as Ed and Lorraine, even if this sequel doesn't live up to the prior installments.