The Conjuring Universe has been quietly trucking along for a decade, reliably releasing a serviceable horror film every year or two and then going away before anyone gets particularly annoyed. There are no TV spin-offs and no Avengers crossovers, which is probably why the series has managed to stick around: You don’t really need to know what happens in any one of them to enjoy any other one of them. That being said, the movies do love their heavy-handed Easter egg moments, where the camera will hang on Annabelle’s glass case for a moment or Patrick WIlson will do a world-weary dad smile and say something like “yeah, I know a thing or two about scary nuns.”
Well, the formula apparently isn’t going to change any time soon, with The Nun II director Michael Chaves—in his third shot with the Conjuring franchise after The Curse Of La Llorona and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It—teasing some kind of big Easter egg-sounding thing in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The tease conveniently doesn’t come up until the very end of the chat, when PR people are rushing Chaves away, but apparently it involves “a pair of eyes that flash on the screen at a key moment in the movie.”
Chaves says he was wondering if anyone would notice it, and when THR’s Brian Davids asked what these eyes mean, the director said, “if you see what it is, the answer is there.” That’s cryptic! And a little hard to parse… but it seems like what he’s saying is that if you see these eyes and you know what they represent, then you’ll know what they mean. Or, as the kids say, IYKYK.
So what the hell is he talking about? Well, The Nun II takes place in the ‘50s, after the events of Annabelle: Creation, but at least a decade before anything else starts happening in the Conjuring universe, so… Annabelle? Something with Annabelle? Or maybe Chaves and series creator James Wan will go nuts and start looping in some other favorites from the New Line/Warner Bros./Atomic Monster family, like Gabriel the Malignant! Or Scorpion from Mortal Kombat! That’s not really the right vibe, but it would be awesome.
Luckily, we don’t have to wait too long to see these eyes: The Nun II is in theaters this Friday.
