Conjuring Universe Movies Tier List: All 10 Films Ranked (2026)

The film the other nine are measured against, and the one that proved a studio horror picture could be built out of craft instead of gore. James Wan shoots a 1971 farmhouse with a camera that drifts and cranes when it should be cutting, holds shots long enough that you start policing the corners of the frame yourself, and gets a real marriage out of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga before he asks you to be scared for them. The hide and clap sequence is the best scare of the decade and it costs the film nothing but patience. It also invented the shape everything after it copied.

The rare horror sequel that is bigger without being louder, and the only other film here operating at Wan's top level. The Enfield case gives it a council house, a single mother with no money and four frightened children, so the dread is economic before it is supernatural. Wan stages the Crooked Man and the zoetrope set piece with obvious delight, but the film works because Ed and Lorraine are given something to lose. Some rank it first, and the case is the Amityville prologue and the painting, which are as good as the series ever got.

The spinoff that had every reason to be disposable and instead turned out to be the third best film in the universe. David F. Sandberg takes a doll nobody wanted another movie about, puts it in a farmhouse full of orphaned girls, and builds his scares around geography: a stairlift, a dumbwaiter, a bedsheet, a wardrobe with a scarecrow in it. Talitha Bateman and Lulu Wilson are genuinely good, the disability of one girl is used for tension without being cruel about it, and the ending stitches back into the 2014 film cleanly. Proof the formula travels when somebody actually directs it.

Wan hands the mainline series to Michael Chaves and it becomes a supernatural detective story, which is a defensible idea and a real drop in tension. The Arne Johnson trial is the best true-crime hook the series ever had, the opening exorcism is the most expensive thing in the film, and Wilson and Farmiga are still the reason to watch. But investigation is not dread: the film keeps leaving the haunted house to look things up, and the occultist villain explains herself in a way the first two films never needed to. Solid, never frightening.

The send off, built around the Smurl haunting and around the Warrens themselves getting old, and it is far more interested in the second thing. Chaves finally gets the tone right by slowing down and letting Wilson and Farmiga play a marriage at the end of a career, with their daughter pulled into the work. It broke box office records for a horror opening and it is the best film Chaves has made in the series. It is also visibly a finale first and a haunting second, which is why it sits here rather than higher.

A babysitter, a teenage daughter, a friend who should not have opened the case, and one night inside the Warrens' artefact room. Gary Dauberman turns the universe's own storage cupboard into a haunted house anthology and it is a smart, contained little film with the best premise of any spinoff. Mckenna Grace and Madison Iseman are good company. What holds it back is that an anthology of five half-introduced ghosts cannot build to anything, so it is a very pleasant hour of small scares that never becomes a movie.

The most atmospheric bad film in the universe. A Romanian abbey in 1952, fog, candles, Taissa Farmiga and Demian Bichir walking corridors that look magnificent, and absolutely no story holding any of it together. Corin Hardy gets a handful of genuinely beautiful frames and then spends the rest of the runtime on jump scares telegraphed a full beat early. Valak was terrifying as a background figure in The Conjuring 2 and stops being frightening the moment a film explains her. It made more money than any other entry, which is why there were two.

Better than the first one, which is a low bar cleared with a little room to spare. Michael Chaves brings actual set pieces, the newsstand sequence with the magazines is a great idea executed well, and a French boarding school is a more interesting box than another abbey. Storm Reid and Taissa Farmiga are stuck delivering lore. The problem is unchanged: the series keeps expanding a mythology around a demon whose whole power was being unexplained, and each answer makes her smaller.

The cash-in, made fast to catch the first film's wake, and the moment the universe learned that the brand alone would sell a ticket. John R. Leonetti was Wan's cinematographer and the film looks fine and moves like a paint drying timer. Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton are given nothing to play, the doll sits inert while a generic demon does the actual haunting, and the one good sequence in the basement with the lift is the only time anybody seems to be trying. Everything Creation later did right, this did wrong first.

The one people forget is in the universe, and forgetting it is the correct response. A great piece of Mexican folklore is flattened into a haunted house film about a Los Angeles social worker, with two children in peril and a jump scare every four minutes. Linda Cardellini is working much harder than the material, Raymond Cruz is having fun as a curandero and briefly the film wakes up. Its connection to the rest is one returning priest, which tells you exactly how much the universe needed it.