Annabelle: Creation

This movie is a prequel in The Conjuring universe set mainly in the mid-1950s. Dollmaker Samuel Mullins and his wife Esther lose their daughter Bee in 1943. Years later they take in a Catholic nun named Sister Charlotte and six orphan girls after the orphanage closes. One girl, Janice, who has polio and wears a leg brace, unlocks Bee’s room and releases a demon tied to a porcelain doll. The house turns into a possession and haunted-house nightmare that leads into later Annabelle stories. The main through-line is grief, temptation, and demonic evil set against Christian faith and protection.

There is little modern identity politics in the story audiences see. The cast is mostly white for a mid-1950s rural California setting, with one Black orphan in a supporting peer role and a Mexican actress as the nun guardian. That diversity sits in secondary and guardian roles and is not driven by identity plotlines. Dialogue stays in horror, period, and religious territory with no activist or progressive political speech. Church figures, the crucifix, and faith work as protection against evil rather than as targets of attack. The real focus is parental grief, a demonic bargain in a doll, orphan danger, and a spiritual fight, not queer, race, or gender ideology arcs.