The first trailer we saw for James Wan’s (Saw, Insidious) upcoming horror film, The Conjuring, didn’t really hit all the usual beats that horror trailers do. Instead it played much more like a short film, building to a big scare in the end. It was an effective tactic that really sold the movie as something that was going to scare the pants off you. So it’s pretty head-scratching as to why the approach was completely abandoned for this new ad for the film, which is just about as generic as a horror movie trailer can get, even while going completely over the top with what it gives away. It opens with some faux found footage that looks derivative of every bad horror movie that’s come out over the last five years, moves on to the same invisible-ghost-yanking-the-legs-of-sleeping-people trick that the Paranormal Activity movies have driven into the ground, checks the creepy kids box off of its list, and then goes on to show way more special effects craziness than probably even the feature itself should contain. The rule of that which you don’t see being scarier than that which you do see seems to be completely thrown out of the window here.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but here’s a poster for a brand-new horror film that promises us that its story has sprung from some true life tales. Crazy, right? Well, perhaps a little less crazy than we’re used to seeing on the big screen. James Wan‘s The Conjuring is actually based on a case file from Ed and Lorraine Warren, noted paranormal investigators and demonologists who were involved with some of the world’s most insane supernatural cases. Remember the Amityville Horror? Yup, it was the Warrens who helped investigate that one. The Conjuring stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as the Warrens, dispatched with investigating “a family terrorized by a dark presence in a secluded farmhouse. Forced to confront a powerful demonic entity, the Warrens find themselves caught in the most horrifying case of their lives.” Sounds fun. The Conjuring opens on July 19th. [Press Release]

Generally it takes a horror movie a chunk of time for it to start being scary. You have to establish a spooky atmosphere, a sense of dread, and then let the tension build to a breaking point before you really start turning the screws on the audience. The new trailer for Saw and Insidious director James Wan’s latest film, The Conjuring, however, proves that this isn’t always necessarily the case. Through the use of a couple of tried and true tricks, like establishing the protagonist’s vulnerability and forcing them to confront the unknown, this little horror movie ad is able to conjure up scares in a mere two-and-a-half minutes. It’s so effective that it practically works on its own as a short film. Check it out after the break: