Director James Wan on the Catholic-School Fear of Nuns and How That Demon Character Was Made

(SPOT.ph) The Nun II drops in Philippine cinemas on September 6 and we know you just can't wait to say hello again to the main star of the show. Valak is an old friend to those who follow The Conjuring Universe—with the nun arguably being one of the demon's spookiest iterations. As Director James Wan himself says in an interview, "Anyone that has been through Catholic school would tell me nuns are terrifying, or can be terrifying," and The Nun is proof of that. So how exactly did this iteration come about?

Also read: You Can Stream All Three The Conjuring Movies Legally in the PH

Here's the story behind how The Nun was created

We first saw the demonic nun in The Conjuring II. Turns out, she wasn't supposed to be there at all. At first, Valak was supposed to take on a more traditional image of a demon, complete with huge horns, as played by Joe Bishara (Who also played Bathseba in the first film). But when post-production editing came around, Wan suggenly had second thoughts. "I realized that the way I had designed this demon, it wasn't right for a Conjuring film. It felt too larger than life. It became too fantastical," he says. The horned demon was not "personal" enough. 

"I always say that at every step of filmmaking, new things appear or bubble to the surface, things that you didn't really think about. Or you realize something else. And for me, in post-production, I realized that I needed to go back and redo the approach for Valak."

So the director reached for something that felt more organic and less, well, expected. "I felt like I wanted to go back to the character aspect of it, and I remember speaking to Lorraine Warren when she was still alive, and she would tell me that a lot of her friends, close friends, were nuns," recalls the director. "And so it came to me that, wow, if an evil entity was to mess with her, one of the things it would do to corrupt her faith and belief would be to take on the iconic look of something that is close and dear to her heart. And that was how the idea of a demonic nun came about."

That spook factor of the nun probably comes from that, how connected its creation was to the original story of the Warrens. "I do think that because of that, the nun character as an antagonist, a villain, hits in a much stronger personal way." Plus, no one can deny that innate fear we have of nuns, thanks to all the tales we spread back in school days; plus points if you came from a Catholic one. As Wan says, "I feel like that has this built-in concept behind it." Clearly, the thought that went into the nun's creation paid off as she soon got her own spinoff movies in the universe. 

What is The Nun 2 about?

Set four years after the first movie, we once again see Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), this time in a French boarding school. And yup, it looks like a certain demonic nun (Bonnie Aarons) has followed.

The Nun II drops in Philippine cinemas on September 6.