It's supposedly based on a true story and with little recent genre competition has been a US hit.

But despite everything it promises, James Wan’s new thriller echoes so many other haunted house / exorcism horror movies you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a TV repeat.

Unless, of course, you’re under 20 and haven’t seen ground-breaking movies from Psycho to Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Orphanage and [REC] on the silver screen.

Patrick Wilson (Insidious) and Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air) are paranormal investigators called in to assist a family in a farmhouse where we suffer mind-numbing lines like ‘Demonic spirits don’t possess things, they possess people’.

Get away! We hear drivel like this every time local radio stations ask callers to discuss their ‘paranormal experiences’.

Soon, you’ll have spotted every visual cliche in the book – from a Chucky-style doll to levitating chairs, vomit, cellar, cubby holes, recording equipment and clocks always stopping at 0307hrs. Yawn!

The action begins in 1968-71, so why the crisp, digital format instead of grainier celluloid?

Or so many modern Steadicam shots reminiscent of recent movies like Ethan Hawke’s Sinister and Elizabeth Olsen’s Silent House...

Even worse, the sound effects are the aural equivalent of a 21st century form of digital diarrhoea, guaranteed to leave the hairs on the back of your neck suffering from erectile dysfunction.

The horror genre was rebooted to an over-hyped degree by The Blair Witch Project (1999) and then Paranormal Activity (2009), but their sequels both led to the kind of dead ends where The Conjuring sits already.

As for Wan, who directed Saw almost a decade ago, he’ll soon release a sequel to his own Insidious (2010) followed by Fast & Furious 7 next summer.

Originality? Not any time soon.