SAN FRANCISCO — As a woman terrorized by supernatural forces, Lili Taylor gets an extreme workout in “The Conjuring,” which opens Friday.
The scare fest, inspired by real events, depicts Carolyn Perron (Taylor), mother of five daughters, battling demonic possession in her home as paranormal investigating couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga) try to help.
“I thought I would get back up to speed in two weeks after it was over,” the 46-year-old Taylor said of the role’s physical demands. “Actually it was a month.”
The cast was invited to the Warrens’ Connecticut Museum of the Occult, which is re-created in the film. It’s a repository of objects that the Warrens have encountered over the years and which they believe are still possessed by evil spirits. A Catholic priest blesses everything daily.
Taylor opted not to visit. “It’s a respect with anything dealing with this,” she said.
Perhaps that’s because Taylor knows about close encounters. “I was in a nasty house in Block Island on Rhode Island in ’93, and it was awful,” she recalled.
“Until then I wanted to have a good story. Remember the sounds of the Annabelle doll in this movie? How scary that is? It was that loud and it happened at three in the morning. Lights were going on and off, doors were slamming shut and I wanted out, I really did.”
Taylor’s starry breakthrough, opposite the late River Phoenix in 1991’s “Dogfight,” has been sustained through smart choices. This fall she stars in the new J.J. Abrams series “Almost Human.”
“I’ve wanted to do this since as a kid I heard, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’
“I had that fear,” she said, of waking one day to discover she’d “sold out.”
She took a breath. “I care about what I do and make choices where I’m going to be happy.
“I realized that when everyone is telling you, ‘Do this other movie that’s going to make you a star,’ you have to remember ‘to thine own self be true’ and do the little movie that means something to you.
“I realized if you go a day at a time you can do that.”
(“The Conjuring” opens July 19.)
