This article contains spoilers from The Conjuring: Last Rites.
Once director Michael Chaves and the Conjuring team figured out how to open the last movie of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s tenure as Ed and Lorraine Warren, they knew they had proper bookends for the final chapter.
The beginning of The Conjuring: Last Rites flashes back in time to see the demonologists’ first case, which causes complications with Lorraine’s pregnancy. With Madison Lawlor playing young Lorraine and Orion Smith playing young Ed, their daughter, Judy, comes into the world as a stillborn, but it’s the power of prayer and Lorraine’s connection to the other side that brings her back to life.
Cut to the end. Wilson’s Ed walks the now-adult Judy (Mia Tomlinson) down the aisle to marry Tony Spera (Ben Hardy). According to Chaves, the movie “needed that reach into the past” to make the story feel like it would come full circle by the finale.
“We’re making a movie where it starts with the birth of their child, they almost lose their child, and then the whole thing ends with letting her go. It ends with the marriage and sending her off into the world,” the filmmaker — also known for directing previous Conjuring films The Nun II (2023), The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), and The Curse of La Llorona (2019) — tells Entertainment Weekly. “That is the spine, and it almost realigns the whole movie.”
The ending cameos
The wedding scene was there from the beginning of development. Dave Neustadter, an executive at New Line, was the one who told Chaves about the main bullet points that would be in Last Rites: the Smurl family haunting, Judy’s possession, and a big ending wedding with big cameos.
Some of the guests populating the pews for Judy’s wedding are figures from past Conjurings. Many of them are innocents Ed and Lorraine saved from demonic hauntings who came out to celebrate the family’s big day.
Those spotted include Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor) and her daughter Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) from the very first Conjuring movie (2013); Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor) and her daughter Janet (Madison Wolfe) from The Conjuring 2 (2016); and young David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard), the possessed boy from the opening of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.
One of the deeper-cut cameos is Natalia Safran, who played Sister Chloe, one of the nuns at the French convent who witnessed the horrors of The Nun II. She’s also an executive producer on Last Rites and is married to Peter Safran, who, like James Wan, is one of the chief overseers of the franchise.
Eric Charbonneau/Getty
Speaking of…Also mingling with the wedding guests is Wan himself, the director of the first two main Conjuring movies and an executive producer of the entire franchise.
“James is so charismatic and friendly and incredible, but he’s actually resistant to going there,” Chaves says of that particular ending cameo. “He is like, ‘Eh, you don’t want me in the cameo. I don’t wanna fly out to England.’ I was like, ‘James, you have to. People are gonna go crazy to see you in here.'”
To use that phrase again, “It just brings it full circle in the deepest way,” Chaves continues. “He’s the Stan Lee of this universe. He is the core spark that kicked the whole thing off. Seeing him in there is essential.”
The cameo that got away
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Which legacy Conjuring actors would return was a scheduling game. Chaves is pleased with the names he did get, but he reveals to EW he tried very hard to get Taissa Farmiga, who headlined the Nun movies as Sister Irene and is the sister of Vera Farmiga. Taissa was already in Europe at the time Last Rites filmed in the U.K., but schedules just wouldn’t align.
“She wanted to,” Chaves says. “I have been dying to get the Farmiga sisters on screen together. I think the only time they’ve been on screen together is in Vera’s movie Higher Ground, which is a great movie. Vera directed this. They’re actually not on screen together, but [Taissa] plays the younger Vera.”
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Chaves says “it was heartbreaking for everyone” to not have Taissa cameo in that ending wedding sequence. “I probably should have just put her in digitally,” he jokes, “just shot her on blue screen and put her in later because that would’ve worked.”
Perhaps there’s a silver lining here. The more Chaves digs into the nitty-gritty continuity details, the more of a brain teaser it becomes. Given the distinct time periods of the main Conjuring movies (beginning in the 1970s) and the Nun entries (set in the ’50s), “I think then people would be like, ‘Wait! She looks too young chronologically for the ’80s. If she was in the ’50s, does she not age? Is she a vampire?'” Chaves says. “It might have broken people’s brains a little bit.”
The Conjuring: Last Rites is now playing in theaters.
