'Doctor Strange' director Scott Derrickson is feuding with Annabelle (yes, the killer doll) (original) (raw)
The filmmaker suggested she was not the best villain in the Conjuring universe.
Published on August 16, 2020 12:47PM EDT
Photo: Matthias Nareyek/Getty Images; Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc
News stories about the killer doll and The Conjuring franchise megastar Annabelle are like buses — you wait a long time for any at all, and then several arrive together, and one of them will involve Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson getting into a feud with the pint-sized supernatural psychopath. Okay, so I may have stretched the whole bus simile to breaking point and beyond. But it is true that Annabelle has been in the news of late. First, a video was released of the doll wandering around the deserted Warner Bros. offices during lockdown, and then it was reported that the "real" Annabelle, which inspired the movie version, had escaped from its museum home. While that latter story proved to be a hoax it is true — sort of — that Derrickson has stumbled into a feud with the famous toy.
The whole sorry saga began Saturday when, for reasons as yet unclear, the notoriously pleasant Derrickson took it upon himself to suggest that Annabelle's fellow Conjuring universe villain The Crooked Man was superior to the doll with a tweet which read "Crooked Man > Annabelle." Derrickson can claim serious form in the horror genre having directed 2000's Hellraiser: Inferno, 2005's The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and 2012's Sinister. Moreover, during the shoot for The Conjuring 2, it was widely believed among the film's creative team that the Crooked Man would be the supernatural entity destined to capture the public's imagination before the character of The Nun was introduced during reshoots on the film and became such a phenomenon that she got her own spin-off movie. "We really felt that Crooked Man was going to be the one," producer Peter Safran told EW a couple of years back. "But it just turned out that the audience had such a fascination with the Nun that we felt that was the origin story we had to tell."
In short, there are some who might think Derrickson has a point. Not among them? Annabelle herself. Shortly after Derrickson posted his opinion, the doll responded, via a video posted to the twitter account of Annabelle: Creation director David F. Sandberg, in what can only be regarded as a creepy and, well, sinister, manner. A clearly shaken Derrickson subsequently responded with the statement "Oh my gawd."
We will, of course, continue to monitor the situation closely. You can see the relevant tweets below.
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