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nnabelle, a prequel to last year'€™s smash horror hit The Conjuring, should not be scary. A movie centered on a demonic porcelain doll '€” which really does exist, by the way '€” should not be terrifying.

How can a fright movie be scary when the main villain appears on the movie'€™s poster '€” and her name is the film'€™s title? There should be no suspense left.

The movie starts with the 1970'€™s opening scene of The Conjuring: Two roommates discussing their doll, Annabelle, who they think has been possessed by a demon.

The set-up suggests that the film will be like every other movie with a demonic doll, despite the clever design of Annabelle. Whoever designed the doll clearly knows their way around creepiness. Annabelle can make your skin crawl just by looking at her.

Then the movie flashes back to the 1960s, when a beautiful, young married couple, Mia and John Gordon (Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton), are expecting their first child.

Mia likes to spend her time watching soap operas and making clothes on her sewing machine, while John is busy working as a doctor.

John cannot wait to give his wife a gift of something that she has long been looking for '€” a rare vintage doll dressed in a white wedding gown, named Annabelle.

After Mia gives birth to a daughter, Leah, a satanic cult bursts into their home '€” and, as fans of Rosemary'€™s Baby know only too well, new mothers, newborns and Manson family-home invaders rarely go well together.

Things quickly go awry for John, Mia and Leah. The cult members summon a malevolent entity residing in Annabelle that relentlessly terrorizes the family.

The couple act realistically, if boringly, throughout the movie. While Mia displays a quiet resilience and determination to protect her family, John falls into the stereotype of the husband who tries to calm his wife by saying that she might be delusional.

The only off-the-wall decision that the couple makes is keeping an infant-traumatizing doll in the first place, no matter how vintage a find it might be.

Despite mixing together a helpless pregnant woman, a vulnerable infant, an untrusting husband, a Satanic cult, a malevolent demon and a creepy doll, the movie does not manage to be truly scary '€” as it lacks the one thing that is essential for a good horror movie: atmosphere.

While Annabelle is fairly scary with plenty of creepiness oozing from the titular doll, there is not much of the suspense or dread that permeated The Conjuring, apart from some jump-out-of-your-seat moments.

That said, director John R. Leonetti, well-known for his work as a cinematographer on five horror movies directed by James Wan, including The Conjuring, deserves credit for some smart, Final Destination-like scares '€” including one agonizingly tense scene with a sewing machine, burning popcorn and a soap opera.

The highlight of the movie was hands down one scene set in an elevator, which left half the people in the theater where I watched the film whimpering, if not screaming.

The movie clocks in at 98 minutes, short enough to make people feel that Annabelle has not overstayed her welcome. Anything longer might have been too much, as was proven by the utterance of one man in the audience during a recent screening of the movie. '€œOh God, please stop,'€ he moaned.