ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — After four main installments, two spin-off series and over a decade of jump scares, demonic possessions and one persistent haunted doll, “The Conjuring” universe comes to a close with “The Conjuring: Last Rites,” a mediocre finale to an inconsistent franchise.

“THE CONJURING: LAST RITES” (2025, 136 min., directed by Michael Chaves)

The horror genre is no stranger to franchises with a million sequels. There are 11 “Friday the 13th” movies, eight “A Nightmare on Elm Street” installments, six “Scream” films and more sequels, reboots and reimaginings of “Halloween” than I can count. Most sequels make the Sisyphean mistake of attempting to recapture the magic of their original, following its story as though it were formula: insert x amount jump scares here, y final girls there.

Unfortunately for this sort of imitation calculus, the movies these sequels are replicating are not often meant for further explication. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is scary not because of its elaborate backstories or expansive world building, but precisely because of its simplicity. There is enough meat on the bone for one – and only one – satisfying meal.

“The Conjuring” movies should have been the exact opposite.

The blockbuster film franchise chronicles the adventures of Ed and Lorraine Warren, real-life paranormal investigators who became famous for their involvement in hundreds of hauntings and demonic possessions in the latter half of the 20th century. In the first film, James Wan’s legitimately terrifying “The Conjuring,” the action was split between a family haunting and the lives of the Warrens, the latter of which featured perhaps the signature master stroke of 21st century franchising: the Warren family trophy room.

Inside their home, Patrick Wilson’s Ed Warren is the guardian of a room filled with haunted objects from previous cases.

“Feel free to look around. Just don’t touch anything,” Ed says. “Everything you see in here is either haunted, cursed or has been used in some kind of ritualistic practice.”

In a meta sense, that room was a promise to the audience that the haunting in the first “Conjuring” was one of many such cases. With the Warrens’ decades-spanning career and thousands of investigations to draw upon, the “Conjuring” universe could conceivably tell a new scary story every year, so long as Wilson and Farmiga were willing to play along. The trophy room was a physical manifestation of possibility. At last, here was a horror franchise which not only merited sequels, but begged for them.

Why then is “The Conjuring: Last Rites” a virtual remake of each “Conjuring” to come before it? Like a moth to a flame or a demonologist to a haunted house, “The Conjuring: Last Rites” proved that the allure of safe, boring, formulaic horror sequels is too strong to resist, even for a franchise with seemingly boundless potential.

Wan directed the first two films in the series, but “Last Rites” director Michael Chaves helmed this and the previous, “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It,” a mid-pandemic affair largely considered inferior to its prior installments. With “Last Rites,” Chaves continues his “Conjuring” cold streak, producing a brutally long, laughably tensionless film with fewer frights than an episode of “Scooby-Doo.”

The biggest flaw of “Last Rites” comes not from its jump scares, which are cheap and proliferant but occasionally effective, nor from the performances, which are solid as expected from series stalwarts Wilson and Farmiga, but instead its devotion to replicating the structural beats of every “Conjuring” film to come before it. “Last Rites” is billed as the grand finale of the series, but it plays like a scratchy record of the greatest hits.

The movie is not a bad ride, per se. Wilson and Farmiga have irresistible chemistry, for one, and watching their perennial return to these roles is like greeting old friends. The movie rewards longtime fans with easter eggs, cameos and references aplenty. The demon designs are the best they’ve ever looked, though too often substituted with a not-so-threatening haunted mirror as a big bad. The problem is not a lack of quality, but a dirge for originality. “Last Rites” has nothing new to say.

When Wilson strolls through the Warren trophy room for the final time in this final film, he once again makes his time-honored speech.

“Don’t touch anything,” Ed instructs.

“We won’t,” this franchise said back.

Rating: 3/5