Annabelle was really only a slight crawl away as a prequel story with a direct link-up featured at the end, but then The Conjuring 2 took Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s Ed and Lorraine Warren to England for the infamous Enfield Poltergeist case with the Hodgson clan.
But the movies have slowly moved away from that ever since.
Annabelle: Creation then took audiences back nearly 20 years before the events of The Conjuring; and then The Nun doubled down on both elements of setting by not only going further back in time (by three years), but also by featuring events primarily set in the Vatican and Romania.
To fill in the gaps for the uninitiated, The Conjuring started the franchise with a story that actually spent a fair amount of time in the Warren home, in addition to following an investigation of the relatively-local Perron household.