Published
In August 2018, a featurette promoted The Nun’s release; the search that kept the page alive afterward asks something more useful: where the film actually sits in the Conjuring universe’s increasingly tangled chronology. This page is that answer, kept current through the timeline’s later additions.
The short answer
The Nun is the beginning: 1952, the Cârța Abbey in Romania, where a suicide summons investigators Father Burke and novitiate Irene into the lair of Valak, the demon that takes a nun’s shape and haunts the rest of the franchise. Everything else in the universe happens after it.
The full timeline, in story order
1952. The Nun. Valak’s origin-as-encountered; the abbey; Frenchie carries the demon out into the world. 1955. Annabelle: Creation. The dollmaker’s grief builds the franchise’s other icon. 1956. The Nun II, the 2023 sequel, slotting directly after the first film’s events. 1967. Annabelle. The doll reaches the suburbs. 1971 — The Conjuring. The Warrens, the Perron farmhouse, and the lecture scene whose exorcism footage is, per The Nun’s ending, Frenchie himself: the universe’s neatest retroactive stitch. c. 1972 — Annabelle Comes Home, the artifact-room siege. 1973. The Curse of La Llorona, the universe’s most loosely attached wing (one shared priest). 1977. The Conjuring 2, where Valak resurfaces as Lorraine’s tormentor, the film that created the nun before The Nun explained her. 1981. The Devil Made Me Do It, the Warrens’ court case. Later entries continue the Warrens’ file into the mid-80s; the architecture above holds.
Why the timeline question keeps being asked
The Conjuring universe was built backwards on purpose: each hit film spun a prequel out of its scariest object (the doll, the nun), so release order and story order run in nearly opposite directions — and the films are stitched with retroactive connectors like the Frenchie reveal, which reward exactly the kind of cross-checking this page exists for. The practical guidance stands in the FAQ: first viewing by release order (the mysteries play as designed), re-watch by story order with The Nun first (the connectors become the pleasure). As horror-franchise engineering it is the era’s most successful, a shared universe that, unlike the superhero kind this site documents elsewhere, never missed its own release dates. The one wing whose future stays genuinely unannounced belongs, as ever, to the tracker’s jurisdiction: horror universes go quiet the same way sequels do, one unmentioned slate at a time.