The third Conjuring film, The Devil Made Me Do It, follows the franchise’s pattern of fictionalizing the “true story” of real cases worked on by self-proclaimed demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, this time zeroing in on the 1981 trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, which became the first case in the US to attempt to use demonic possession in the defense. Naturally, there’s a lot in the movie that is completely invented for the sake of telling a compelling (and definitively supernatural) horror story. The Conjuring movies have, after all, already established the existence of things like demons and malevolent spirits and Ed and Lorraine Warren as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga have actual, real, undoubtable psychic abilities in the world of the films, unlike their real life counterparts who could make no such definitive claims.
So where do those lines start to blur in relating the actual Arne Johnson case to the movie? Let’s break it down. Some spoilers from The Conjuring 3 to follow, so please proceed with caution.
The Events Leading Up To The Murder
Both the movie and the real life incident start not with Arne himself but with young David Glatzel (played by Julian Hilliard in the movie.) David, 11-years-old in 1980, was helping his family clean a rental property in Brookfield, Connecticut when he began describing being repeatedly threatened by “an old man.” Of course, no one in the family believed him and assumed he was just trying to get out of doing chores. But over time, these visions of an “old man” warped into terrifying encounters where David would wake up screaming and crying from nightmares, describing this person as having demonic features and muttering Bible verses in Latin. The family allegedly accounts that David would go into seizure-like fits, wind up with mysterious bruises, and begin speaking in strange voices to quote the Bible and Paradise Lost. They also said they heard strange noises coming from the attic of the home.
Eventually the Glatzel family called the Warrens in, which is where the movie starts, in media res, during David’s exorcism. The movie version covers some of the backstory of David’s possession, but leaves out the old man in favor of a monster that David encounters first via a water bed.
During the exorcism, Arne Johnson–then dating David’s older sister, Debbie, apparently “invited” the demon into himself to spare David, which plays out in the movie as well. From there, things begin to pivot away from the accounts given by the people involved and into more fictionalized territory. According to Johnson, the demon fully possessed him after he saw it in an old well on the rental property, but in the movie all bets are off for Arne as soon as David’s exorcism was over. There’s also an extensive subplot involving Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) having a brush with death thanks to the demon nearly stopping his heart which, suffice to say, didn’t actually happen.
Even the exorcism itself is a matter of some contention. According to accounts, David was subjected to three different exorcisms involving four different priests but the Diocese of Bridgeport beyond “helping David through a difficult time.”
With Ed out of commission and Lorraine at his side, the possessed Arne has a few days to himself to really spiral, his condition getting worse and worse while the Glatzel family is left none the wiser.
The Murder Itself
On February 16, 1981, Arne Johnson stabbed his landlord Alan Bono–called Bruno and played by Ronnie Gene Blevins in the movie–repeatedly with a five inch pocket knife following a heated argument. Reportedly, Bono had been intoxicated after a lunch with Arne and his girlfriend Debbie. During the confrontation, Bono apparently grabbed Debbie’s 9-year-old cousin, Mary, who had been with Debbie and Arne at the time, and refused to let her go. Before the stabbing, witnesses said Arne was “growling like an animal.”
Bono died several hours after the event with “four or five tremendous wounds” to his chest.
The film version of these events obviously dramatizes the affair, and removes Mary from the equation, instead opting to give Arne a surreal and nightmarish trip after a drunken Bono grabs Debbie and attempts to make them all dance to Blondie’s 1980 hit “Call Me.”
In the movie, Arne’s picked up still covered in blood and disoriented walking down a road, claiming he thinks he hurt someone. It’s not entirely clear if this was based on actual events or not, but Arne was found two miles away and immediately taken to jail. This was, as noted in the movie, the first ever recorded murder in Brookfield history.
From here, the movie starts taking real liberties and introduces a subplot involving satanists and witches attempting blood rituals that, as is probably obvious as the movie begins to get more and more magical in its scares, never actually occurred.
The Trial
Unsurprisingly, the actual court case happening in the background of The Devil Made Me Do It is maybe the least interesting part of the movie, and mostly just a driving force to ramp up the stakes for both Arne and the Warrens as they engage in psychic combat with actual, literal demons.
In reality, the attempt at using demonic possession as a defense was dismissed outright by the court. The judge went as far as to say that no such defense could ever stand in the legal system because it was “unscientific” to allow related testimony, which meant the jury could not legally consider demonic possession a viable explanation during their deliberations. In lieu of this failed attempt, the defense opted to argue self defense.
To circumvent this rather anticlimactic turn of events in real life, the movie version glosses over the actual legal proceedings themselves in montage format, and never actually touches on the decision to prohibit possession into a legal argument. It ends on a postscript explaining the real outcome of the case: Arne was convicted of first-degree manslaughter on November 24, 1981 and sentenced to 10-20 years in prison, but only wound up serving 5.
The Aftermath
While the Conjuring universe has envisioned the Warrens as both genuinely altruistic and genuinely psychic, the reality of their work was often a lot more murky. While they never collected money from the families they worked with, they would often publish books about their experiences which would come to be viewed as exploitive or fictionalized in and of themselves after the fact.
Such was the case with the Glatzel family. The Warrens worked with their writing partner, Gerald Brittle, on their accounting of events in a book called The Devil In Connecticut, which was published in 1983. In 2007, one year after Ed Warren’s death, the now adult David Glatzel and his brother Carl against Lorraine and Brittle.
According to Carl, “[David] was never possessed. He, along with my family, was manipulated and exploited, something the Warrens were very good at, and along with their author, Gerald Brittle, they concocted a phony story about demons in an attempt to get rich and famous at our expense, and we have the evidence to prove it. The Warrens told my family numerous times that we would be millionaires and the book would help get my sister’s boyfriend, Arne, out of jail. I knew from day one it was a lie, but as a child, there was nothing I could really do about it.”
Carl went on to work on a tell-all book recounting his own version of events called Alone Through The Valley, . The book itself, however, either never made it to mass market publication or is no longer available.
However, not all parties involved seem to be of the same mind about the Warrens or the occult. Both Arne and Debbie provided interviews and first hand accounts for an episode of Discovery Channel’s A Haunting about the case where they claim to be adamant of their support in the Warren’s version of events.
