The Conjuring: The History of Malthus (The Annabelle Demon) | Horror History

To find the origin of Malthus, the evil

demon

of the deepest crevices of hell, we must go back to the ancient texts that for the first time detailed the name of the infernal entity: The Devil's Welcome. One page, studied by Mia Form in Annabelle, speaks of the Rite of Evocation, or the ceremony of summoning an evil spirit,

demon

, or deity. She says there is a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls titled “Curses of Belial” that talks about the existence of demons. The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish manuscripts found in the caves of Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea, so this book suggests that there is actually a long-lost piece called the Curses of Belial, which reflects the sentiments shared by demons to take advantage of weak souls.

Belial is an actual term referenced in various religious texts, which some religions have personified as The Devil. So when Mia reads about how Belial was thought to have influenced sin through the way people addressed him and all his culprits, she is essentially learning that the other demons mentioned in this fragment, including Valak, Malthus and others all answer to Belial. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 and are believed to be between 1,800 and 2,000 years old, making them the oldest copies of biblical text ever discovered. If we take those dates and apply them to the Conjuring universe, we can estimate that the oldest recorded text about Malthus was written around 20 BC.

We will probably never know the actual date of the demon's creation, because this is how far

history

goes back. But that's enough to put a date on the thumbnail. To learn the ENTIRE story of the presence that made this creepy children's toy famous, including how he can become the most powerful being in The Conjuring universe, stay until the end of this video. Welcome to the History of Terror. My name is Professor CZsWorld. What do they call me? A YouTuber, an influencer, a creator. "Something inhuman." Something like that. Today's lesson is Malthus, who is most notably the antagonist of the Annabelle spin-offs.

Like many villains in The Conjuring, Malthus is based on mythological folklore. The Lesser Key of Solomon is a 17th-century demonology spellbook containing details on many of the demons found in popular fiction, including Paimon from Hereditary and Valak from The Conjuring 2. It is divided into five titles. Ars Goetia focuses on the practice of

conjuring

demons, so naturally it serves as a major story source for The Conjuring franchise. It contains 72 demons, each of which fulfills some type of function in the hierarchy of hell. There are kings, dukes, princes, marquises, knights, presidents and counts. Malthus is considered an earl of hell.

Also sometimes known as Halphas, this demon is not associated with the ram form as shown in the movies, but rather as an evil storm with a hoarse voice. Only Malthus is voiced by Jeff Garlin. *Jeff Garlin Laughter* Halphas is known for building cities to house weapons and ammunition for his 26 legions of demon warriors, which he can send to attack wherever he wants. We see this concept realized in a different way in Annabelle, where Malthus is the object of evocation, not of an army, but of a cult known as The Disciples of Ram. Let's get into the demon's first interactions with humanity.

For as long as religious entities have existed, those entities have had followers. Malthus's followers are a cult known as the Disciples of the Ram, a reference to the creature's rarely seen true form, a humanoid figure with ram-like horns. It also has long, claw-like fingers and coal-black features, which Annabelle director John Leonetti explains: "I wanted it to be like this thing had been in hell and it was jet black, charred like it had really been in hell." Hell". and that was the visual inspiration for it.” He also has a beautiful goatee. This one receives the seal of approval from the Czech Republic.

Malthus is the traditional gargoyle-like demon, which works to thematically tie the character to this idea of ​​a religious clash. Which brings me back to the middle of it. The evocation page (the page that explains the summoning of the demon) mentions that an incantation must be performed with spilled blood. We cannot see the full text, but it seems that the summoner should be godless and impure. Looking at the two Disciples of Ram performing the ritual on Annabelle, I'd say they check those boxes pretty clearly. Especially the dirty part. Let's move on to the specific chapter on Malthus and his Disciples of the Ram.

This passage sets the rules. In simple terms, for Malthus to take a soul and possess a body, the victim must agree to give it up. Once the deal is made, it is eternal, and the church fears this, because if the devil tricks someone into doing this, there is not much they can do to fix it. "Which brings us to the three stages of demonic activity: infestation, oppression and possession." Why don't I have a projection screen like that? Ed explains the first stage, the infestation… “Those are the whispers, the footsteps, the feeling of another presence… that eventually grows into oppression, the second stage.

This is definitely the case with Malthus, whose targets include an orphan who receives different treatment from the other girls due to her disability, a new mother who spends her days alone due to her husband's busy work schedule, a nurse who can't say no to helping people and a student who is desperate to get in touch with her deceased father. “It destroys the victim. He crushes his will. And, once in a weakened state, he leads them to the third and final stage: possession. The Devil's Welcome also explains a couple more rules. As I mentioned, blood must be shed to summon him, but this should only be done as a sacrifice to Malthus.

Any creature that is sacrificed should not be used as food, unless it is meat that the demon has specifically given them to eat. The last paragraph on the page reads: "And the bow will be in the earth, and I will establish my covenant with you, which I have made between you and me, for every living creature of all flesh that is on this earth." He is then saying that he wants to take all the souls and possess all the living creatures on the planet. Basically the same thing the music industry is trying to do. There is a graphic on the right titled Malthus, Count of Hell, the only time the antagonist is mentioned by name in the series, and the image shows the ram demon grabbing this baby, representing a common tactic used. he knows what he uses.

By putting a baby in danger, he can sometimes pressure a naive mother into offering her soul in exchange for the child's safety. JOHN: "But you said Lia's can't be accepted, you said it has to be offered." FATHER PÉREZ: “Yes, and a baby cannot offer her soul.” JOHN: “My God. Missing in action." This would not be the only intelligent deception tactic used by the devil. FATHER PÉREZ: “The devil is the father of lies. The demons are his manipulators. No one ever plans to offer his soul.” This presence would infest many homes over the years, and each of them taught the demon some new tricks that it would carry on to its next target, meaning that if not contained, it could become increasingly more deceptive, making it more dangerous and more powerful.

We will learn some of these tricks as we follow Malthus's journey through

history

. Malthus's first known targets were the Mullins family, Samuel and Esther. They lost their 7-year-old daughter, Annabelle “Bee” Mullins. a car accident in 1943, so Malthus tried to manipulate them while they were grieving. The young woman's diary was abruptly interrupted, but after many nights a new message appeared: “Dear diary. “I came home today.” “Annabelle is coming home. Rated R." Not yet, Annabelle's coming home. We're still in Annabelle: Creation. It all started one night during dinner when they heard Bee's favorite record start playing randomly and assumed it was her spirit.

They noticed more and more activity that imitated the things their daughter used to do and eventually they found a note asking for permission to move this doll so it could be with them forever, and they happily agreed. However, this was not the spirit of their deceased daughter, and by falling for this trick and having faith that they could talk to Bee again, the evil entity became stronger. They could soon use the form of the Mullins girl. They were able to see what they thought was her ghost in fleeting flashes. It was stage 1: infestation. “But we soon realized it wasn't our Annabelle at all.” “What do they want?” "A soul.

And they won't stop until they get one." Mrs. Mullins decided to approach one of the apparitions with a cross, but what appeared to be her daughter convulsed and writhed in a demonic form. She dropped the cross in shock. and Malthus attacked her, scarring her face and gouging out her left eye. As the child's mother, Mrs. Mullins was the most psychologically vulnerable. This was stage 2: oppression. She had used her hope of speaking to her daughter again. to attack her soul. Samuel approached the church and they saved Mrs. Mullins from possible possession, but the evil was still attached to the doll, so they locked her in Bee's closet and surrounded her with pages of the Bible, a cross and sprinkled with holy water.

The demonic activity would cease, but the Mullins did not realize that the room would have to be continually blessed for the seal to remain strong. Four years later, in 1947, it is discovered. the Dead Sea Scroll, and news of the Disciples of Ram would soon spread among the troubled group of people who would start the cult. Another 8 years pass and Mr. Mullins and his wife decide to take in a group of girls from the St. Eustace Orphanage. They believed that housing these girls would be their penance, but they unknowingly gave Malthus exactly what he wanted: a new, weaker target whose soul was ripe for possession. “He's been quiet for 12 years…” The strange activity would begin again after the girls moved there in 1955.

The new target is Janice, a young woman who is partially immobilized by polio. After discovering her, Malthus uses her Bee form to sneak up on her and scare her. The first night, during dinner, the lights flicker, a sign that evil is no longer contained in that one closet. That night, he leaves Janice a note that says "Find me", referencing a game Bee used to play with her father. Janice is led to Bee's room, which is supposed to be locked. Malthus has left her the key to her closet so she can find and discover the hiding place of her doll.

He makes her uncomfortable, so he covers her and tries to close her, but when his back is turned, her inhuman spirit appears behind her, but when he takes off the sheet, Malthus is in a form not visible to the eye. human. Scarier things start happening in the house. Linda sees the doll move on its own while she plays hide-and-seek, and a shape in a mask that looks like Mrs. Mullins scares the girls and disappears when the light turns on. “That wasn't a ghost. Ghosts can only be of dead people.” One night, Janice is lured back to Bee's room, where she catches an apparition asking her for help. "Can you help me?" "What do you need?" "YOUR SOUL!" Malthus proceeds to drag her away, leaving a laceration on her leg.

She manages to escape the room, but Malthus slams all the bedroom doors so he can't get help, leaving her no choice but to go take the stairlift. Isolating the target so that they feel alone seems to be a common Malthusian tactic. She looks up and sees evil leaving the room in what appears to be a gaseous form. This is the only time we see the demon travel like this, but I can only assume that this is how he usually moves, so he can travel through walls and perhaps change himself into multiple forms. Janet's chair gets stuck ¾ of the way down, so she tries to get up and crawl to safety on her own.

The last thing she sees is Bee's form, standing at the top of the stairs, before he AIRS her to the top of the hallway and then drops her to the cold, hard floor. She later admits to Sister Charlotte, who is in charge of all the orphans, that she believes the Presence is taking advantage of her because she is the weakest, but Charlotte disagrees and tells her that the devil takes advantage of the orphans. weak in faith, not of the weak. of flesh or bone. The night she returns from the hospital, her friend Linda has some terrifying experiences with Malthus.

She looks through the keyhole into Bee's room and sees the Annabelle doll using the rocking chair, but when she opens the door, she is nowhere to be seen. Then, while he is playing with a ball launcher in his room, the invisible entity grabs it and lifts it to the top of the door frame before snatching it from his hands. He hears loud footsteps...or maybe hooves footsteps, running towards her, so he hides in the top bunk from her andlistens, as the lights go out and Malthus inhabits the lower bunk, leaving behind charred black steps, another sign of the burning that the creature would suffer. have endured in the deepest layers of hell.

Linda looks down and sees Annabelle staring at her, and she hides under the covers after seeing Malthus, in his true demonic form. At this point, Janice, Linda, and the two older girls, Carol and Nancy, have had terrifying experiences with Malthus, but he has not yet attempted to possess any of them. I think the devil is testing each of the girls to see whose faith is weaker. Janice is the weakest in the body, but this may have weakened her faith as well. As she grows older and more crippled, she realizes that no family will want to take in a broken child, and that idea demoralizes her.

She is also dealing with the fact that she is treated differently than the other girls due to her condition, and this makes her an easy target, because the demonic attacks can be explained as Janice lashing out in response to what she is doing. happening emotionally. She is at that age when her hormones can take over her emotions, an age that is commonly associated with the attraction of a poltergeist, because it is said that spirits are attracted to the negative feelings that come as one approaches adolescence. . The next day, Sister Charlotte brings her out into the sunlight and Malthus decides who to try to possess her first.

She takes the form of a nun, something we've seen many times in her European counterpart, Valak. The creepy nun is a popular form these demons take, because she represents an attack on the victim's religious beliefs, much like how the sinister knocks in The Conjuring always come in threes as an insult to the holy trinity. This creepy nun pushes Janice out of her wheelchair and into the barn, where she takes Bee's form again, to step out of the shadows and begin stage 3: possession. In The Conjurverse, you basically just have to vomit in someone's mouth to possess them...

I guess. I think Malthus basically made Janice give up at this point. She had just returned from the hospital and was already going to have another demonic encounter and probably another injury. With a possessed victim, Malthus had achieved his objective, but let us remember the text of The Devil's Welcome: “to establish a pact” with the people and “for every living creature, of all flesh that will be on the earth.” In other words, Malthus will now use Janice to try to possess the bodies of others and then continue to expand until she takes over the entire world.

For his next target, Malthus wants to take advantage of the element of surprise, so when Sister Charlotte comes in to check on her, Janice pretends to be fine. But with Janice's added power, the ram demon decides to try again with a goal she couldn't possess 13 years ago. Mr. Mullins receives an alert about the return of the Annabelle doll from Linda and walks in on her to find her ready to confront him in her kitchen. But the doll is not actually possessed by Malthus, the demon only moves it to give the appearance of possession. As Lorraine Warren later explained... "Demonic spirits don't possess things, they possess people." Janice does her best Lights Out Diana impersonation and transforms into her traditional gargoyle or ram demon form, which I'll refer to as her "true" form because that's what I picture in my head when I think of a demon. .

This time, even holding a cross is not enough to protect him from evil. I think it's a combination of Malthus gaining power by possessing Janice and the fact that her cross is homemade and he admits it's not his best work. Malthus brutally breaks each of her fingers, one by one, forcing her to drop the cross before attacking him. Even if Mr. Mullins was supposedly not using the best cross of his, he still speaks volumes for Malthus's power. We never see any of the other Conjuring villains do anything like this. The scene represents the power of faith.

It is a common trope among religious people to claim that they found religion after a personal tragedy. For Mullins, losing his daughter created the negative energy that initially attracted Malthus. So the idea of ​​turning to religion is used in a literal sense, where pages from the Bible and holy water are used to seal away the demon. So now the film shows us that letting go of religion, literally dropping the cross, has opened him back up to vulnerability to Malthus. Linda realizes that the evil presence seems to be related to the creepy doll and she tries to throw it into the well.

Look Linda, just because it worked for Coraline doesn't mean it will work for you. Once again she hears heads and hooves marching behind her the closer she gets to the well. After dropping it, she hears a small voice shouting, "help me." It's hard to know for sure, but it seems to be Bee's voice, so it's probably Malthus once again trying to trick her into thinking Bee's soul is trapped in her wrist or something. It almost works, because Linda is practically dragged into the well by a pair of pale hands with long fingers. This doesn't appear to be Bee or Janice.

They could be the hands of the Nun form I mentioned earlier, or it's possible that other forms were acquired before Bee. With the help of Sister Charlotte, Linda is saved and the well is covered, but when they return to the house, the Annabelle doll is back on the couch where Janice had just slept. Charlotte takes the doll to Mrs. Mullins' room in search of answers, and her reaction speaks to the terror it caused her 12 years ago. "No! NO! Get that thing away from me! She claims that evil has returned, calling it "the devil himself", which is probably not accurate based on what we know from The Devil's Welcome.

Malthus is just one of many demons who work under the command of the devil Belial. With the ghost's demonic nature now revealed, Malthus can no longer rely on deception to possess his victims, so with the game plan out of the window, he simply launches an offensive attack. complete. At this point, there are several things happening in multiple locations. I would still attribute all of this activity to Malthus, but since Janice is still alive and possessed by Malthus, she is essentially programmed to act on his behalf. other orphans, while Malthus is downstairs, using any way he wants to torment Mrs.

Mullins Then Nancy, Carol and Tierney find Janice having tea with the Annabelle doll and Janice attacks Nancy. Sister Charlotte tries to dispel the demon by praying to her, so Janice pushes her into a mirror. The girls try to scream for help, but Janice has another idea. “Or could you help me?” Meanwhile, Malthus cuts Mrs. Mullins in half, crucifies her against the wall, and rings her doorbell to try to lure the girls into the room. They are horrified by what they find and attempt to flee the property using Mr. Mullins' truck, where they encounter a scarecrow with the ability to move on its own.

Using the rules that have been established about these demons, we can intuit that this is another of Malthus's tricks. Like the Annabelle doll, the scarecrow is not possessed, but simply moves to give the impression of possession. The girls try to hide in the barn, but Carol is locked alone and encounters the scarecrow. Once again, she is in a position reminiscent of a crucifix, and again, she relates to Malthus mocking religious symbols. She discovers the true demonic form hidden inside the scarecrow, and it shoots out, climbs to the ceiling and descends on her, but she manages to escape to the toy store, where Nancy finds her.

At the house, Linda discovers the remains of Mrs. Mullins, which come to life and chase her, so she hides in the dumbwaiter, which Janice can crawl through to go after her. She sees the claw of Malthus's true form grab onto the platform, signifying that both the possessed Janice and the demon itself are coming after her. She hides in the "blessed" closet where the priest had sealed Annabelle, but Janice finds her. Sister Charlotte is able to rescue her once again by throwing her cross necklace around Janice and locking her in the closet. I think it's quite appropriate that Malthus is continually thwarted by an actual nun.

The pain caused by these religious objects causes Malthus to go crazy, causing the house to shake, lights to flicker, electronics to malfunction, furniture to fly everywhere, and glass to shatter. The demonic growl can even be heard from outside the house when Malthus, despite the pain this might have caused, penetrates the wall plastered with Bible pages, allowing Janice to disappear into the night. Only the Annabelle doll and Sister Charlotte's necklace remain. However, it seems that Malthus may keep the doll, because after Father Massey blesses the house, the doll is taken to the police. The Father claims that the evil is gone and that the doll is now just a doll, but after being moved to a new room filled with Bible pages, Annabelle is still under the control of an outside force.

It seems that Malthus kept the doll by choice. It is later described by paranormal expert Ed Warren, who explains that the demonic force is “attached” to the doll. Of course, it's never explicitly explained why, but I'm guessing it's for one of two reasons. Perhaps Malthus considered it valuable to keep the Annabelle doll because she had demonstrated its success as a way to deceive people. Or maybe there is actually some sort of bond forming between the evil deity and this handmade toy, much in the same way Ed Warren describes the items in his room of cursed artifacts.

REPORTER: “Why not just throw them in an incinerator? Destroy them." ED: "Well, that would just destroy the container. Sometimes it's better to keep the genie in the bottle." Janice somehow ends up at St. Joachim's Orphanage, where she is adopted by a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Higgins. She takes the name Annabelle, Bee's real name. Although she is still possessed, she doesn't take it right away. Instead, it focuses on an evil person who becomes increasingly horrible over the next two years before finally running away from home to join a cult of course. The one she joins is The Disciples of Ram, the group led by Charles Manson dedicated to summoning Malthus.

She has a cultist boyfriend who seems crazy, and although this part of the story is not shown on screen, I suppose it's no coincidence. that the Annabelle doll ends up in the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Mia Higgins' next-door neighbor. Perhaps it was one of the cult's evocation spells that caused the doll to be moved so close to home on October 2. 1967, twelve years after her adoption into the Higgins family and about a decade after she ran away, she is now Janice. known as Annabelle, she would return home. "Annabelle Comes Home. Rated R." No. It's not you yet.

As part of a ritual to invoke Malthus, Janice and her boyfriend invade her adoptive parents' house one night and slit their throats before heading next door to retrieve the doll. This fulfills the blood sacrifice requirement of the evocation spell. Part of the ritual to awaken the demon also seems to involve Janice offering herself while she holds the doll in her arms and possibly leaving this A symbol on the wall in red paint. Or maybe she just felt it was an improvement on the baby's room wallpaper. I kind of like it. The summoning ritual seems to work, because the next day, unexplained events begin to happen in John and Mia's house, including a sewing machine that turns on in the middle of the night, the doll moves on its own, and the next day, unprovoked movement of a rocking chair.

Mia tells her husband that she can't stand having the doll anymore. “That doll. You have to get rid of it. I mean, he had it in his hands.” But just like when Linda tried to throw the doll into the well, she somehow reappears. It seems that if Malthus has his sights set on you, there is nothing you can do to get rid of the Annabelle doll. Unlike the penguin in Mario 64. *sad penguin noises* On October 5, Malthus starts a fire in Form's kitchen, and when a pregnant Mia tries to escape, she is UP AIR back into the flames.

Thinking the house is haunted or something, John and Mia move to Pasadena after Mia gives birth to the baby. This is one of the classic

horror

movie mistakes. Malthus simply follows them there and continues to mess with them by playing with the TV and using the appearance of the girl and the teenager Janice to scare Mia and get into her head. Or at least something that looks like Janice. I mean, Malthus is a pretty big demon, who I'm sure doesn't mind trivial little details like what Janice really looks like. I also talked earlier about how Malthus was able to exploit the Mullins' negative emotions when they were grieving.

Here he uses similar tactics by listening to John and Mia's conversations about the stress caused by their new fatherhood and John's job to divide them further. Malthus seems to focus his attacks on when Mia is home alone with the baby to make herfeel even more isolated, like on October 7th when he lures her into the living room while hiding behind the curtain, a little trick he learned from Bee, then throwing her to the floor and fleeing in the form of Janice, or whatever. . With Mia, Malthus is taking a somewhat similar approach to the one he took with the Mullins.

Instead of tricking them into giving up their souls with the false promise of speaking to his daughter again, Malthus pretends to go after the baby's soul, hoping that Mia will offer her soul in exchange for the safety of the baby. her daughter “Demons can't just take Mia souls. A soul needs to be offered before it can be received.” "And a baby cannot offer her soul." So the next night, Malthus does everything he can to make Mia feel like her baby is in danger. After putting Lia to bed, he goes to the basement to put some things away when he hears the sound of a baby fussing and a stroller appears at the end of the room.

She investigates and discovers that the stroller is actually empty and that it is a trap devised by Malthus in his true form. Malthus grabs her forearm and scratches the "A" symbol on it. The creature rises to a terrifying height as she flees, and the elevator malfunctions when she attempts to take it to safety, forcing her to run back through the basement to reach the stairs. She hears her baby crying as she runs in a virtual suicide attempt back to her apartment, but she trips and drops the flashlight. When she looks back over the edge of her, she notices that Malthus is right below her, almost the same scenario as when Linda saw Malthus in the bunk below her at the Mullin farm.

When she reaches her floor, she looks back and sees Malthus, growling and staring at her from less than a full light down the stairs below. Then, during a flash of lightning, she instantly advanced up to her level, before she ran the rest of the way to her apartment. This is one of the only times we see Malthus use this method of extremely fast movement or possibly teleportation, but it helps explain something about Annabelle's creation. Specifically the part where he scares the girls out of the downstairs bedroom and then is already waiting for them when they run to the barn.

She some spends an indeterminate amount of time. It's enough for the scratch on Mia's arm to have completely healed. On the way home from a bookstore, he hears Janice/Annabelle whisper her name, and the baby stroller rolls out onto the street and gets the old Gage Creed treatment of a garbage truck. Luckily for her, Lia wasn't in the stroller, but this is all part of Malthus' plan to make her feel that giving up her soul is the only way to save the baby. This narrative continues later, when he traps Mia in the nursery and bombards the baby with a barrage of heavy books from the bookshelf.

Mia manages to leave the room to reach her daughter, so Malthus terrifies her by picking up the Annabelle doll while he watches her from the shadows with bloodshot eyes. Terrified, John and Mia send the doll to their priest, Father Perez, so Malthus continues the journey, lending further credence to my theory that there is some kind of binding force between the demon and the doll. Along the way, Malthus interrupts his father's baseball game by playing with the radio. Rude. Just rude. The Father tries to take the doll to the church, and Malthus, perhaps remembering the pain being locked up and surrounded by sacred objects inflicts on him, channels a ton of his power and AIR FINDS Father Perez on the street.

Janice, or at least Malthus in her Janice form, takes the doll to return it to Mia. When John discovers what happened to Father Perez, he tries to call and warn his wife, but Malthus jams the phone lines. It's interesting to me that a demon that existed long before electronic technology would tamper with phones, televisions, and radios so much, but it makes sense that it would try to trick humans using their primary methods of communication. Just as he used the form of a nun before taking Janice's soul, he now uses the form of Father Perez to stage her final attack on her. "May God have mercy on your soul!" He goes to great lengths to try to convince Mia to offer up her soul, including playing demonic chants on the record player, disfiguring dolls in the nursery, crawling on the ceiling, and even kidnapping Lia, sending Mia on a desperate search. from his daughter that culminates with his question. "What do you want of me?" …And write her answer on the ceiling, before writing the revised answer in the window that opens.

This is a parallel to Janice offering the knife to Linda in 1955. It is a suggestion to Mia to give up her life so that Malthus can harvest her soul, but at the end of the day, she must be the one to give herself up. John arrives just in time to save Mia from wasting her life, however, Malthus still ends up getting what he wanted in the end when her friend Evelyn gives up her own soul in Mia's place. So Malthus wins this round, but the Form family gets their baby back and the Annabelle doll disappears from their lives.

In April 1968, the doll somehow ended up in a gift shop, and where a woman who claimed to have been searching high and low for one of Mr. Mullins' limited edition dolls picked it up and gave it to her daughter, Camilla, as a birthday gift. . As with each of the previous victims, Camilla and her roommate Debbie begin to notice small paranormal occurrences that increase over the following months. At first they would only notice the movement of the doll's hand or leg. Then he moved from room to room when they were gone. They hired a medium, who appeared to successfully establish contact with the spirit of Annabelle Higgins, without realizing that she was actually speaking to Malthus.

Malthus told the outlet that Annabelle passed away in her apartment a long time ago and she wanted permission to move in with the doll and be friends with the nurses who lived there. As we already know, this was all a trick. They began to find disturbing notes, which led Malthus to trash his guest room. They try to throw the doll in the dumpster... but as we already know, that doesn't work either. Debbie finds another ominous note and they discover the Annabelle doll sitting in the apartment once again. Something also happens between the doll and one of her boyfriends, although it's not clear exactly what.

Realizing that they are in more trouble than the medium led them to believe, they decide to ask for help and contact renowned demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Warrens explain how the inhuman spirit deceived them. "You gave him permission to infest your lives." Before things get worse, Ed and Lorraine call the church to send a priest to bless the apartment and its inhabitants, which seemed to work. I think Malthus knew what he was up against here and decided to calm down for the moment. The Warrens would take the doll for safekeeping. Annabelle was finally returning home. “Annabelle is coming home.

Annabelle comes home. Rated R. Annabelle comes home. She arrives. She arrives. Arrives. Annabelle comes home. Rated R. Annabelle is coming. Arrives. Annabelle. Annabelle comes home. Live it in IMAX. As Ed and Lorraine return home after finally getting the Annabelle doll, her car breaks down next to a cemetery in Maryville. Given Malthus's tendency to mess with lights, televisions, radios, telephones, record players, elevators, and chairlifts, I'm sure this breakdown was probably the result of the evil entity associated with the doll. Malthus decided to do this next to a cemetery because of another powerful attribute that this demon possesses. "It's the Ed doll.

It's a beacon for other spirits." Then, all the spirits left in the cemetery are attracted to Malthus, who is attached to the doll, and Malthus can manipulate these spirits to do his bidding. One of them pushes Ed into the street in front of a speeding truck. Jud Crandall wouldn't have liked it. "Don't let him go by the way, Lewis!" Malthus takes over the truck, so the driver has no control and tries to take out Ed, who is barely able to avoid the oncoming vehicle. The inhuman spirit was much more powerful than they anticipated. Their priest, Father Gordon, waits for them when they arrive home.

As Annabelle is taken to the artifact room, the doll stares at her young daughter Judy, perhaps perceiving her as a weaker target. At first, they leave the doll in a rocking chair, but that causes complete chaos, causing the watches to work backwards and influencing the other artifacts to come to life. A simple blessing and a splash of holy water are not enough to contain it, so they build a display case with material from the Trinity Church chapel. The doll gains a reputation as the Warrens' most malevolent object, at least at that time. He would continue to be housed at his home in Monroe, Connecticut and would be blessed twice a month by a priest.

There he would remain for the next three years. In 1971, while the Warrens investigate a case in Rhode Island, they bring back the spirit of a witch named Bathsheba. Because Bathsheba is particularly malicious and Malthus is a beacon to other spirits, the witch is attracted to the doll and frees it from the protective casing. In the middle of the night, Bathsheba takes the doll to one of the rooms. Bathsheba wakes Judy up by pulling on her ankle and investigates her house. She finds Bathsheba rocking in a chair and combing Annabelle's hair in one of the rooms. Malthus turns Annabelle's head to give the impression that the doll itself is turning to look at Judy.

She tries to leave the room, but discovers that she is locked in and that the two malevolent spirits have disappeared from human sight. This is a potentially disastrous situation, you have a young inexperienced medium trapped inside with two powerful and malicious supernatural entities. One of them starts throwing furniture at her, but luckily Ed and Lorranine get home in time to rescue her before any harm comes to her. Ed checks the room of cursed artifacts to see if anything is out of order, but at that moment Annabelle is back in the display case, so this possible catastrophe ends up being more of a minor incident, but perhaps this also reinvigorated the spirit of the devil.

The following year, in September 1972, shortly before Judy Warren's birthday party that year, a girl named Daniela Ríos sneaks into the Warrens' artifact room and places a photo of her late father on the piano, with hoping to find a way to make contact with the other side to talk to him. Malthus feels that she is a vulnerable target because she is in mourning, just as Mr. and Mrs. Mullins were. She asks for a sign from any presence in the room, so Malthus leans the Annabelle doll against the glass. This causes Daniela to open the case and pick up the doll, but just then a smoke alarm from the kitchen makes her quickly continue on her way.

However, she forgets to close the case again and Annabelle is finally able to escape again. As a beacon to other spirits, Malthus can release many more horrible entities from the objects they are bound to. Some of them include The Ferryman, The Black Shuck, The Haunted Wedding Dress of Anna Baker and others. After escaping her prison, Annabelle doll sits at the kitchen table while Judy's babysitter, Mary-Ellen, orders a pizza. She rings the doorbell, accompanied by the familiar set of three knocks. When Mary Ellen looks through the peephole, there is no one there, but when she opens the door, she sees Bee, who asks if Annabelle can come play.

When Mary-Ellen says that she has come to the wrong house, she tells her to look behind her, but the doll is gone. Malthus takes different forms so that different people try to deceive them. In Daniela's case, he uses the form of her father, which is part of Malthus's plan to lull her into a sense of security. Later, Judy senses something happening upstairs and sees the bride associated with the haunted wedding dress enter one of the rooms. However, this can't just be the ghost alone, because she finds a note that says "Miss Me?" just as the nurses did when Malthus began terrorizing them.

So when the bride comes at her with a knife, Malthus is likely leading it. Later that night, Malthus continues to torment Judy by hiding the remote control under her couch and scaring her with the Annabelle doll when he goes to look for her. Black Shuck is a werewolf-like creature who guards the perimeter of the house, preventing Bob, Mary-Ellen's love interest, from offering help to the three girls. Daniela is lured back into the room of cursed artifacts when Malthus leaves the door open to tempt her. He attempts to wear the mourning bracelet, an item that is said to allow someone to connect with a deceased loved one.

While this bracelet works for Lorraine under the right circumstances, Malthus infers it by posing as his father. She sees her face appear in the mirror, but when she turns to look at it, she is missing one of her eyes, just like Mrs. Mullins. Malthus probably saw how much the one-eyed Mrs. Mullins scared the girls on the farm and decided to try using it again on Daniela. That's probably what makes Malthus one of the most intelligent and dangerous inhuman spirits in the franchise.Spell: Never forget an old trick. So the longer he stays, the more tactics he learns and the better he can trick his prey and force them to give up their souls.

The fact that he still uses Bee Mullins as one of his forms 29 years after his death shows that Malthus always has an old trick at his disposal. As with the previous hauntings of the Mullins and Form residences, Malthus escalates things during the night to try to unnerve his victims. He first breaks Mary-Ellen's glass of milk and then randomly turns on the radio. When he checks on a sleeping Judy, Mary-Ellen discovers the Annabelle doll under the covers. She finds it a little disturbing, but she doesn't know that the doll is linked to an evil entity, so she doesn't think much of it.

When she comes downstairs, the television is on. Malthus also takes a television into the device in the room where Daniela is. This time, instead of pulling out another old trick, he pulls off a new one by having the TV show what's happening a few seconds in the future. Like many of the strange things that happen in The Conjurverse, this phenomenon is never explained, but I personally think it's actually very simple. If Lorraine has a clairvoyant ability, allowing her to foresee future events, such as her daughter being in danger in The Conjuring 1 and her husband in The Conjuring 2, who's to say that Malthus doesn't also have a touch of clairvoyance. ?

And since we've already seen that Malthus has the ability to make any electronic device go crazy, it doesn't seem too difficult for him to be able to display these future events on a television screen. Meanwhile, Mary-Ellen listens to a tape recorder playing audio from Ed and Lorraine's case file about their investigation of The Ferryman, the evil spirit released by Malthus. She finds the source of the audio and turns it off. The boatman is known for putting coins over the eyes of his victims, and he follows a trail of coins until he sees a pair of them apparently floating on the ceiling.

We saw Malthus hide on the roof before attacking both Carol in 1955 and Evelyn in 1967. So seeing the Ferryman use this approach means Malthus was probably involved. He's probably using the ferryman as a conduit in the same way we saw Valak use Bill Wilkins' ghost in The Conjuring 2. Mary-Ellen runs towards him, but trips over something and runs back into the darkness. Using her flashlight, she is able to temporarily free herself from the evil spirit's clutches. She immediately heads to Judy's room, but Judy would have her own confrontation in which Malthus would bring out her entire arsenal of alternative forms.

Judy sleeps next to a rotating color wheel lamp, a novelty dating back to the 1950s. This lamp would have a common effect on the demon Malthus. It begins with Malthus dragging Judy by her ankle to wake her up. This is exactly how Bathsheba awakened her victims in The Conjuring, although it is unclear whether Bathsheba actually escaped from the music box in which she was captured, or whether Malthus had just learned of this from the witch's ghost when they met on previous year.When she wakes up, Judy quickly realizes something is wrong when she discovers the Annabelle doll under the covers with her.

Bee appears under the covers at the foot of the bed and scares her, causing her to knock over the color wheel. She continues to spin and project colored light from her onto the wall. As she changes each color, she is shown a different form of Malthus. It starts with the doll, then Bee, then the adult version of Janice, and finally the rarely seen "true form" of Malthus. He then appears behind her on her bed and yells at her. She runs out of the room, where Mary-Ellen is waiting for her. With Black Shuck outside, they realize they are trapped.

They call Lorraine for help, but Malthus has also tampered with the phone lines. LORENA: "Can I talk to Annabelle?" MARY-ELLEN: “I'm sorry?” LORRAINE: "You have to give it a soul, dear." MARY-ELLEN: “What?” LORENA: “A soul? She wants her soul. Give me the soul of her.” That's even more annoying than telemarketers. Well… no, maybe it's not so annoying. Before attempting to attack one of her souls, all the bells in the house begin to ring, which could be another callback to Mrs. Mullins, who had a bell by her bed to call for help. Then the typewriter goes all Jack Torrance and writes the words "Miss Me" over and over again.

A phone starts ringing in the artifact room and Judy and Mary-Ellen enter just in time to stop Daniela from touching it. She admits to being the one who left Annabelle off the case and has bad news about the other spirits in the room. JUDY: "What else did you play?" DANIELA: “Everything.” This causes Mary-Ellen to have an asthma attack, but when Judy goes to get her inhaler, the creepy girlfriend sneaks up on Daniela, using the same forward teleportation mechanic that Malthus used on Mia Form in the stairwell. . It looks like she has stabbed Daniela in the stomach, but it's just an illusion.

She pins her to the ground and vomits into her mouth, so for the first time since Janice in 1955, Malthus has a new vessel. After Judy returns safely with the inhaler, Daniela tries to motion for the two to go upstairs, but Judy, following her mother's average skills, senses something is wrong and takes Mary-Ellen to try to help. find the Annabelle doll to put it on. the end of the

horror

they experienced that night. They find the cursed children's toy in the closet inside the Warrens' office, but the door is locked, so they have to play this board game, Feely Meely, to win the key.

I found it a little strange that this evil, inhuman spirit would just stop in the middle of everything to start a board game with these kids, but when I came back, I realized that the game is seen in the cursed items room in the Al At first, this is probably another test of Malthus manipulating whatever evil spirit was living in this board game. Judy manages to win the key and Mary-Ellen ventures into the closet, which now resembles the ferryman's tombs. She can only throw the doll at Judy before being dragged back into the abyss, but Judy recovers the loose ball and escapes into the end zone before encountering Daniela, who is imbued with both the evil of Malthus and the wrath of the spirit of the wedding dress.

Mary-Ellen arrives with a key lock and Big Brain Judy's quick thinking probably saves a couple of lives when she turns on a projector with a recording of Ed performing an exorcism. Basically, this seems to have the same effect as him performing the actual exorcism and causes immense pain to the demonic presence within her. This gives them enough time for Annabelle to return to her case, but when Judy opens it, Malthus slams it shut, corners her, and attempts to suck out Judy's soul using a Dementor's kiss. As you may know, the Dementor's Kiss is an act performed by the spectral species of prison guards in The Wizarding World (also known as the Harry Potter franchise) to suck the soul of anyone who gets in their way.

The Conjurverse and the Wizarding World may be Warner Bros. properties, but they are not the same universe. However, Malthus doesn't seem to care and he almost gives Judy the Dementor's kiss. Mary-Ellen tries to come in and save her, so Malthus takes one last STILL AIR and sends her flying into the wall. But this gives Judy enough time to grab a nearby cross, something she probably should have done a while ago, and press it against Malthus's head. Mary-Ellen places the Annabelle doll back in the chapel's display case, but Malthus's power prevents her from forcibly closing it. Things seem hopeless as all the evil spirits who escaped that night surround them, but fortunately for them, Daniela appears, now free of demonic possession.

She is the only character we know to ever break free from Malthus's clutches, and with her strength, they are able to close Annabelle's case. I can only imagine that Daniela never gave in to the idea of ​​Malthus taking her soul from her, and that's why she was able to be exorcised. The doll and the demonic presence linked to it are once again sealed, and without the Annabelle doll's spiritual beacon, Malthus and the other spirits can no longer materialize in our world. "The evil has been contained." And as far as we know, Malthus would remain locked in Ed and Lorraine Warren's room of cursed artifacts from then on.

That concludes Malthus's story in the canon of The Conjuring Universe films, but the real-life story is perhaps open to another chapter. Lorraine Warren passed away in April 2019 and left the room of cursed artifacts, which her son-in-law, Tony Spera, knows in real life as the Warren Museum of the Occult. That's Judy's husband. In 2020, because of course this would happen in 2020, it was reported that the Annabelle doll had somehow “escaped” and was now not in the room. Tony Spera took to YouTube to shoot down those rumors. “Annabelle is here. She didn't go anywhere. She didn't take a trip...

So you know. Here she is. Let's put aside the rumors, guys.” But during this fiasco, it also emerged that Tony and Judy were looking to relocate the museum, which has been closed for some time due to zoning issues. So it's not hard to imagine a future Conjurverse story in which one of the movers fails to take proper precautions with the Annabelle doll and Malthus is let loose once again. We've been seeing a lot of these "many years later" horror sequels recently, so perhaps a modern Annabelle sequel could eventually be in the cards. Let me know in the comments what other Conjurverse characters or entities you'd like to see covered next here on Horror History and if you love horror, remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, RING the death bell, not the bell of the spirit, for notifications and see you next time.

Assuming we both survive.