Shazam! production designer, Jennifer Spence rejoins the Conjuring universe as set designer in the latest Annabelle sequel.
Spence has worked on Lights Out, The Nun, Insidious: Chapter 2, Annabelle: Creation and now talks with The Knockturnal about exactly what went into designing the set of this deeply haunting horror film. See the interview below!
The Knockturnal: Did you make any changes to the artifact room?
Jennifer Spence: I didn’t change it too much because I do have to match it to the actual artifact room but I did add an extra part of the room, one that we didn’t really see in any of the other parts. The real house it was quite long and went around and down and so I added a room on the right hand side where some stuff is going to happen and I’m not really allowed to say what happens but we got a few things going on in that room, a lot more action than we’ve seen before.
The Knockturnal: Can you talk about the trap door?
Jennifer Spence: Oh yeah, well the trap door doesn’t exactly have a scene at the moment. It’s something that I did, just thinking ahead. When I do these movies I tend to do more than one cause I’ve kinda been on this role in these movies so I know that there will be more to come inevitably. So just when I was designing I thought it would be a better idea if I could include some things that maybe aren’t in the script in order to open up some other avenues you know for future directors and future ideas. So I’ve got one on the stairwell in the house and then one under the floor of that little alcove. Even if we don’t use it, it’s just something we put there and maybe in the next story, it might be the Conjuring 4 but it’s just to give everyone a little more room to work with. And I also put that hidden staircase behind the fireplace because when I was watching all the films, just to go back to the Conjurings, I noticed that you could never see behind the door as you came into the main office so why don’t I put something there? It was a nice way to move from upstairs to downstairs when going through the same hallway. So I kind of tend to do that with all my movies, I did that with Annabelle 2 too. I put a lot of different rooms in the house that we didn’t necessarily use and then we ended up using it anyway because they liked it.
The Knockturnal: What’s your method of adding new artifacts to the artifact room?
Jennifer Spence: I think between the set decorator and I and talking to Gary [Dauberman] we sort of discussed what new items we’re going to add and so I look to my decorator as well but I also spend some time at big flea markets. I go up to the Long Beach flea market and the one in Pasadena and all over because I kind of like to look for things, it makes it a good jumping off point for story ideas for Gary so when I’m shopping on the weekends on my own time I look for little things and then I share pictures all the time, what about this, what about this? It’s really fun, it keeps me involved in the story.
The Knockturnal: Do you add pieces that make it feel like we’re in the 70’s?
Jennifer Spence: Yeah, when I first decided to do the film and Gary and I were talking about how the house was going to look and also just with James [Wan] and all the movies that we had done before, I had a little issue because the house had never been established, it was just pieces of other homes that they used and so I was struggling with how does all this go together because it was all different houses. James was like, make your own thing, do your own thing. There are key rooms that we’re going to keep which are the big artifact room, the big office room, we wanted to keep the hallway’s wallpaper that were in the other ones and then I could do whatever I wanted after that. So Gary and I talked about a three level house so that there are places to go because a lot of the story takes place in the house. And just picking my wallpapers and the mood of the film, I just wanted it to seem sort of maze like, in a way that there are things to shoot through and look through. You’ll see the Coca Cola bottle glass and warm colors and I got real vintage wallpaper from the Mid West, people selling online. I always like to get new wallpaper, that’s my favorite thing to get so I try to use real stuff which I did this time as well. It’s a fun process to kind of develop the look.
