The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is the latest horror movie that claims to be based on a true story. Of course, many horror movies in the past have claimed to be based on real events, from The Blair Witch Project (which pretended to be a real documentary) to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was inspired by the crimes of Ed Gein, who never committed a massacre, never used a chainsaw, and was not based in Texas.
Similarly, the third film in the Conjuring series (and eighth in the franchise) has at its heart a true story, but the truth of what happened in the case of Arne Johnson (Ruairi O'Connor) is different in a number of key ways to what happened in The Devil Made Me Do It.
The True Story Behind The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
The following contains spoilers for the entirety of The Conjuring 3.
The story of the first half of the movie sticks closest to the real events. The film kicks off with Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) present at the exorcism of 11-year-old David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard).
In documentaries about these events, members of the Glatzel family have claimed that David started having visions of a strange man after they entered a new house. Soon after this, he began having night terrors and waking up with unexplained scratches and bruises. They brought in a Catholic priest to bless the house, and 12 days later the Warrens visited.
The pair later claimed that during the exorcisms they performed on him (a tape from one of which plays at the end of the movie) he levitated, predicted the murder Johnson would commit, and found himself choked by invisible hands. How much of this you believe, of course, depends on whether you believe the Warrens were real demonologists (as The Conjuring movies claim), or fakes.
Either way, it was claimed by the Warrens in the book The Devil in Connecticut that at one of these exorcisms, Johnson pleaded with the force inside Glatzel to inhabit his body instead. Subsequent accounts of the events have claimed that weird things started happening after these exorcisms. In a Discovery Channel documentary, A Haunting, it was claimed by Johnson that a few days after the exorcism, the demonic force within him forced him to crash his car into a tree.
Johnson then claims the demon possessed him after he returned to the property the Glatzels had rented and looked in the well that was said to house the demon. As seen in the film, soon after this Johnson stabbed Alan Bono (renamed Bruno Sauls in the film), his landlord and the employer of Johnson's girlfriend Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook in the film). After drinking, per a contemporary WashingtonPost article about the case, Bono became agitated, grabbed Debbie's nine-year-old cousin, and refused to let go. This led to a confrontation between Johnson and Bono in which the former ended up stabbing the latter multiple times, leaving multiple wounds, including a gash that went from Bono's stomach to his heart.
The case reached international attention, however, over what came next. The day after the murder, Lorraine Warren told police that Johnson had been possessed when the crime was committed, and when the case came to trial, Johnson's lawyer Martin Minnella entered a plea of innocent due to demonic possession. Johnson himself did not claim that he was possessed, merely that he could not remember committing the crime.
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