Annabelle 2

The San Diego Comic Con schedules have been rolling out all week, and Warner Bros. has a bunch of heavy hitters this year to possibly keep Marvel and Disney from stealing too much of the spotlight. Warners takes over Hall H on Saturday, July 22 at 11:30 AM, starting with a showcase of all their exciting upcoming releases, hosted by master of ceremonies Chris Hardwick.

Funny how there aren’t any movies about creepy-looking dolls that stay inanimate. The tradition of killer miniatures is a rich and varied one, stretching from smart-mouthed icon Chucky to Twilight Zone resident Talking Tina to the gang of supremely ticked-off slave toys in Tales From the Hood’s third quarter. The unsettling lifelessness of a doll’s visage has made it a reliable source of horror in the past, and the Conjuring franchise struck its own vein of gold with the homicidal, pigtailed Annabelle. The precocious little psychopath got her own starring vehicle in 2014 with the simply-titled spinoff Annabelle, and now we’re taking a step back in time to witness her dark baptism in blood.

Would the horror genre work as the basis for a cinematic universe? It’s an interesting question. While horror films are certainly no strangers to sequels and prequels  —  there are eleven Friday the 13th movies, after all, and most of them are pretty much unrelated outside of their central villains  —  they are fairly reliant on individual characters to support the weight of new movies. There’s not enough depth to the Friday the 13th franchise to make a movie thatdoesn’t feature Jason Voorhees; for a horror film to truly inspire its own cinematic universe, you’d need a B-roll of characters who could each terrify audiences in their own right.

2014’s Conjuring spinoff Annabelle was a runaway box office hit, presumably because dolls will always be scary and people will always love being scared by them. Because any B.O. success warrants a sequel these days, David F. Sandberg (Lights Out) is hard at work on a new one, which released a teaser last fall. Today we’ve learned that the Annabelle sequel’s official title is Annabelle: Creation.

Just when you thought it was safe to buy dolls again…Nope. Here’s the first trailer for Annabelle 2, which, as the title suggests, is a sequel to last year’s relatively successful James Wan-produced spinoff of The Conjuring, featuring that damn creepy doll and her creepy antics. This time, she’s terrorizing a doll-maker, and that seems totally fair, to be honest, since he’s responsible for the creation of her kind and their endless suffering at the hands of ruthless children.

Ben Affleck’s commitment to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has caused a few delays for his next directorial effort, Live by Night, which was originally set to hit theaters in 2015. Warner Bros. has announced yet another new release date for the thriller, hopefully one that’s a bit more permanent this time around. The studio has also set dates for a few other films, including the sequel to The Conjuring spinoff Annabelle.

The Anabelle doll was one of the highlights of The Conjuring, and like a lot of standout characters in other movies, she received her very own spinoff / prequel, which will now have its very own sequel, feeding the never ending cycle of sequels / prequels / spinoffs. In any case, there will be a second Anabelle movie because you people are apparently delighted by your own fear of dolls.