The Conjuring in Chronological Order

Strumbl Original · Movies · 13 movies · Recommended watch order

Every releases of The Conjuring's universe, following the exact timeline of the story. Perfect journey for a second watch after having seen the release order.

The Journey

Before you start: This is the Conjuring Universe reassembled into the story's own time, which means the release calendar goes out of the window: you start with an entity's origin decades before anyone investigates it, and you reach The Conjuring — James Wan's 2013 film, the inaugural entry in the franchise — only halfway along. Bring an eye for how the spine was built, because it was a writing decision: sibling screenwriters Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes refined that first script and moved its point of view from the haunted Perron family to paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, which is what gave the series a recurring pair of protagonists to return to. Everything that follows — dolls, nuns, folk-tale ghosts — grows outward from a film that took $319.5 million worldwide against a $20 million budget and an A− CinemaScore, the first horror film ever given an A grade by the company.

  1. The Nun (2018) — The Nun (2018) opens this path because the story's own clock decides the order, and that produces an oddity worth savouring: the demon at its centre is one of the franchise's late inventions. Valak was added to The Conjuring 2 as a replacement antagonist, with James Wan reshooting portions of that film to put the nun on screen, which is the only reason a prequel about her exists at all. Starting here means meeting the entity years of story-time before you meet the investigators who go looking for her.
  2. The Conjuring: First Communion (2027) — The Conjuring: First Communion (2027) belongs to the franchise's spin-off lane rather than its main series: where the Warren films follow attempts to help people harassed by spirits, the spin-offs chase the origins of the entities the Warrens encountered, and that is the ground this prequel occupies. It sits in the same production stable as the stops on either side of it here, The Nun and Annabelle: Creation — New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster and the Safran Company, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures — and it exists because the series has grossed $2.7 billion against a combined budget of $263 million, making it the highest-grossing horror franchise to date.
  3. Annabelle: Creation (2017) — Annabelle: Creation (2017) opens the doll thread that will run through the rest of this path, arriving straight after The Conjuring: First Communion and handing over to The Nun II. It is the earliest of the three Annabelle films in story time, so the object introduced here is the one that keeps resurfacing at later stops, and its keyword fingerprint — prequel, evil doll, demonic possession — marks it as an origin story rather than a case. The release dates around it swing by a decade in each direction, which is simply what happens when the order follows the story's own clock instead of premiere dates.
  4. The Nun II (2023) — The Nun II (2023) closes the pair begun by The Nun and hands the material to Michael Chaves, the most-repeated filmmaker on this path: by this point he had already made The Curse of La Llorona (2019) and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), and he went on to The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025). The change of temperature comes from Storm Reid as Sister Debra, a novice who openly doubts her faith, written as a sceptical foil for Sister Irene in a franchise that usually keeps its clergy believing.
  5. Annabelle (2014) — Annabelle (2014) was shot in sequence by director John R. Leonetti, so his actors always knew where they stood in their emotional arcs — an unusual luxury on a $6.5 million production that returned $257 million worldwide and effectively locked in the studio strategy of building cheap spin-offs off a hit horror title. Watch it as a late-1960s domestic piece rather than a monster movie, and note that the porcelain figure with the cracked painted face was designed for the screen: the doll owned by the real Ed and Lorraine Warren is an ordinary soft Raggedy Ann, judged too harmless on camera. Its opening home invasion by cultists is patterned on the 1969 Manson Family killings, the same real crime dramatised head-on in Wolves at the Door (2016), the stop that follows here.
  6. Wolves at the Door (2016) (optional) — Wolves at the Door (2016) is the loose thread on this route, marked optional because it is an adjacent true-crime piece rather than a chapter of the Warren story — skip it and nothing in the chronology breaks. Taken, it pays off the previous stop directly: it treats the 1969 killings that Annabelle (2014) only glances at in its opening, and it shares that film's cast. It also shows the order at work most plainly, since the three stops around it run 2014, then 2016, then 2013 — story time, not premiere dates.
  7. The Conjuring (2013) — The Conjuring (2013) is where this path stops circling the entities and finally reaches the investigators themselves — six stops of origin material give way to casework. James Wan directs here, and he returns further along the route for The Conjuring 2, while this film founds The Conjuring Collection, which supplies four of the thirteen stops. Its cast carries outward across The Nun, Annabelle Comes Home and every later Conjuring entry, so this is the stop that starts binding the universe together.
  8. Annabelle Comes Home (2019) — Annabelle Comes Home (2019) is the tightest seam on this whole path: writer-director Gary Dauberman has said it takes place shortly after the opening of The Conjuring, where the doll is introduced, but before many of that film's events — so in story time it nests inside the previous stop rather than following it. Mckenna Grace plays the Warrens' ten-year-old daughter Judy in a recast role, and the film carries a dedication to the real Lorraine Warren, who died on 18 April 2019, roughly two months before it opened.
  9. The Curse of La Llorona (2019) — The Curse of La Llorona (2019) shares its release year with Annabelle Comes Home, the stop just before it, and it was developed under the working title The Children, acquiring the La Llorona name only in July 2018 — roughly eight months after shooting had already wrapped. It also swaps a case file for a folk figure: La Llorona, the weeping woman who drowned her own children, is a centuries-old story told across Mexico and Latin America, and the film moves her off the riverbank of the tale and into a 1970s Los Angeles social-services caseload.
  10. The Conjuring 2 (2016) — The Conjuring 2 (2016) takes the investigators to England and the alleged Enfield poltergeist — a haunting reported around two sisters aged 11 and 13 in their mother's council house in the London Borough of Enfield between 1977 and 1979. It is also the hinge the earlier stops kept pointing back at: the nun added during reshoots proved popular enough that Warner Bros. gave her a film of her own, the moment the series stopped adapting Warren case files and began generating its own monsters.
  11. Note: The Conjuring: The Lover (2021-06-01 · Comics) — The Conjuring: The Lover is a five-issue limited series that serves as a prequel to The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, following a college student named Jessica as she struggles with college life and discovers that something sinister is targeting her. Its issues carry backup stories exploring the cursed artifacts in the Warrens' basement museum, so it sits on this page as the branch that fills out the objects behind the cases rather than the cases themselves. Take it as a detour beside the film it precedes, where its story-time position actually falls.
  12. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) — The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) moves the series into the 1980s, a period James Wan had floated early as the ideal setting for a third film; he stayed on as co-writer of the story with screenwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick. Go in expecting an occult investigation rather than a haunted house — it was received as the most somber and meditative of the Conjuring films, the one that lacks the kinetic haunted-house element. During pandemic-delayed reshoots an entire demonic antagonist was cut because it "just wasn't quite connecting," the performer reassigned to a role as an infirmary patient instead.
  13. The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) — The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) closes the Conjuring Collection thread on this path, four years on from The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and sharing that film's 1980s setting. Its screenplay passed through several hands: David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick wrote a draft from an original story he co-authored with producer James Wan, and Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing were brought in for rewrites in September 2024. After it, only one stop remains, and it leaves the Warrens behind.
  14. Note: The 3:07 A.M. Project (2013-07-17 · Short) — The 3:07 A.M. Project is an anthology of four horror shorts presented under The Conjuring banner as a marketing device ahead of that film's theatrical release, with the witching hour of 3:07 A.M. as the only recurring theme tying them together. It does not connect directly to the franchise's story — it stands as the first attempt at expanding it — but that specific time is referenced in The Conjuring itself, which is why the detour belongs beside that film and nowhere else in this chronology.
  15. The Revenge of La Llorona (2027)
  16. Note: The Devil's Hour (Video) — The Devil's Hour is a featurette in which Lorraine Warren and other paranormal investigators explain some of the supernatural occurrences seen in the film. It sits here as the documentary counterweight to the dramatised version of the Warrens you meet on the path — the people the films are built on, speaking in their own voices.
  17. Note: The Crooked Man (Movie) — The Crooked Man is a spin-off film in the Conjuring line, and the franchise's own record supplies nothing beyond that: a title and a category. It belongs on this page as a named branch of the universe rather than a stop you can watch in sequence.
  18. Note: Untitled Conjuring television series (TV series) — The untitled Conjuring television series is exactly what its listing says — a television project within the franchise, recorded without a title or a description. It sits at the edge of this chronology as evidence of how far the universe has been extended beyond its films.

Where it leaves you: Thirteen stops later the shape of the thing is clear: a treatment that producer Tony DeRosa-Grund carried for nearly fourteen years before New Line Cinema closed a deal with his Evergreen Media Group on 11 November 2009 became a universe big enough for Warner to package seven of its films as a single Blu-ray collection on 31 May 2022. What the chronology can't resolve is its own seam — the earliest events in this story keep being written last, as new spin-offs are commissioned to explain entities the Warrens met in passing, so the front of the timeline will always be the newest part of it. For one more pass, follow the music: Joseph Bishara, who scored James Wan's Insidious (2011), wrote The Conjuring's score and also appeared on screen as the entity Bathsheba, one of many crew members Wan carried over from his earlier films.

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