The Conjuring: Last Rites — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

Early in the film, Judy glimpses the Annabelle doll sitting on a rocking chair in the corner of her childhood bedroom — a vision she dismisses as unreal. It is a direct callback to the doll's long history of tormenting Judy specifically: Bathsheba used Annabelle to attack young Judy in the first Conjuring, and the doll nearly killed her in Annabelle Comes Home. The rocking-chair staging also echoes how the doll was repeatedly found posed around the Warren house in that film. It's the first of two Annabelle appearances here, re-establishing that the doll and Judy have been connected since the franchise began.

Ed and Lorraine's university lecture about Annabelle is a deliberate bookend to the packed lecture scene that introduced them in the 2013 original. Twelve years later, the auditorium is nearly deserted — a visual gag about the Warrens' fading celebrity by 1986, when pop culture had turned ghost-hunting into a punchline. The lecture even covers the Annabelle case again, triggering Judy's psychic flashes to her own near-fatal encounter with the doll in Annabelle Comes Home. It's the film telling you upfront that the Warrens' era is ending — the same idea the whole 'last rites' framing is built on.

During the lecture, a student asks the Warrens if their work is 'anything like Ghostbusters,' another quotes Ray Parker Jr.'s 'Who ya gonna call?', and one even asks if Ed has ever been slimed. Ed bristles, but Lorraine defuses it by admitting they genuinely loved the movie. It's a period-perfect joke — the film is set in 1986, two years after Ivan Reitman's comedy made paranormal investigators a national punchline, which really did change how the public treated the Warrens. SlashFilm flagged it as the franchise's most unexpected comedy nod, and Ghostbusters News covered it as a loving tip of the hat rather than a jab.

The locket Lorraine has worn since James Wan's 2013 original — the one holding Judy's photo, which has repeatedly surfaced during supernatural events — becomes a load-bearing object here. Last Rites reveals its significance through the 'Lucy Locket' nursery rhyme Lorraine teaches young Judy as a charm to ward off evil, tying the object directly to Lorraine's maternal fears. It also delivers one of the film's nastiest scares: Lorraine finds the locket in the kitchen sink moments before the blood-flood sequence. A 12-year-old costume piece retroactively becomes franchise mythology.

The Rhode Island police officer who helped the Warrens during the Perron farmhouse case in the first Conjuring — the fan-favorite sidekick who shotgunned a door during the exorcism — resurfaces at Ed's 60th birthday party, cooking at the barbecue. The film doesn't just cameo him; Brad explicitly mentions the Rhode Island investigation and points out a scar on his cheek from the original film's events, confirming the Perron case left literal marks. It's a small-scale, human callback that fits Chaves' stated 'Logan' approach: the people who lived through the cases are the connective tissue, not the demons.

Among the guests at Ed's birthday party are the actual Judy (Warren) Spera and her husband Tony Spera — the real-life daughter and son-in-law of Ed and Lorraine Warren, whose on-screen versions are played by Mia Tomlinson and Ben Hardy. The real Ed died in 2006 and Lorraine in 2019, so Judy and Tony are the last living links to the family the entire franchise dramatizes; Tony still runs the Warrens' Occult Museum collection. Having them watch their own younger selves fall in love on screen is the film's most poignant meta touch, and you will only catch it if you know their faces.

While Janet Smurl does laundry in the basement, a figure looms in the frame — which turns out to be a poster of John Wayne in full cowboy attire. It's a classic Conjuring-style misdirect (the franchise loves letting your eyes find the 'ghost' before revealing something mundane), and an era-appropriate set dressing choice for a blue-collar 1980s Pennsylvania household. ScreenRant singled it out as one of the film's oddest genre collisions: a Western icon deployed as horror-movie sleight of hand.

When Jack Smurl is attacked in his bed at night, he floats above the mattress in a composition that deliberately evokes Regan MacNeil's iconic levitation in The Exorcist (1973). It's not a one-off: Michael Chaves has referenced William Friedkin's film before in his Conjuring-universe work, and the elder statesman of possession cinema is the natural touchstone for a franchise about demonologists. The staging — flat on his back, rising parallel to the bed as the room watches helplessly — is close enough that multiple outlets flagged it as intentional homage rather than coincidence.

Heather Smurl watching a videotape of the family birthday party alone in the dark — while something in the recording blows out the candles that stayed lit in reality — is staged as a direct nod to Poltergeist (1982), with the lighting and her positioning in front of the glowing screen mirroring Carol Anne's famous TV communion. It's a smart period fit too: home video and haunted broadcast imagery were peak 1980s horror grammar, and Last Rites is set in 1986, right in Poltergeist's cultural shadow.

After Lorraine finds her locket in the sink while washing dishes, blood begins pouring out and floods across the kitchen floor, forcing her to back away as the wave rushes toward her — an unmistakable riff on the elevator blood-flood from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Scaling the image down from a hotel corridor to a family kitchen is very on-brand for this franchise, which has always domesticated its horror. ScreenRant notes it as one of two Shining references in the film, and the second one is walking around with an axe.

One of the spirits haunting the Smurl property is a man who murdered his wife and her mother with an axe on the farmland where the house now stands — and his weapon-first pursuit scenes visually parallel Jack Torrance's rampage in The Shining. There's a franchise layer too: Michael Chaves previously armed Ed Warren himself with an axe during the finale of The Devil Made Me Do It, so Last Rites completes a pattern of Shining nods running through Chaves' Conjuring films. The axe-man also serves the film's Conjuring 2 trick — a lesser spirit masking the true demonic culprit.

Scenes in the Warrens' artifact room reward a pause button: the cursed music box from the Perron farmhouse case in the original Conjuring sits among the shelves, and the possessed samurai armor — background dressing in the first two Conjuring films before it came alive to menace Judy and Daniela in Annabelle Comes Home — stands watch as well. Annabelle herself remains sealed in her blessed glass case. The samurai suit is a movies-only invention (it doesn't exist in the real Occult Museum), which makes its inclusion a pure in-universe continuity nod rather than a true-story detail.

The Conjuring universe's architect gets a farewell of his own: James Wan — who directed the first two Conjuring films, created the franchise, and produced Last Rites — appears on camera as one of the guests at Judy and Tony's wedding. Chaves discussed the cameo in his CinemaBlend interview about assembling the finale, and IMDb's trivia page logs Wan among the wedding crowd. Wan almost never puts himself in front of the camera, so his presence at the franchise's send-off party functions as a signature on the whole 12-year, nine-film universe.

After credits packed with archival footage of the real Warrens, the very last image is a photograph of the real Ed Warren in theatrical costume standing before the actual mirror that inspired the film's villain — an artifact housed in the Warrens' Occult Museum and labeled, remarkably, 'the conjuring mirror.' The Annabelle theme plays over it. Chaves told ScreenRant the franchise-title coincidence was never planned: screenwriters Richard Naing and Ian Goldberg surfaced the real artifact during development, and 'it was really just luck. I loved ending on it, and I love that photo.' The franchise literally ends on the object that shares its name.