The True Story Behind Every Conjuring Movie Explained

When James Wan’s The Conjuring was released in 2013, it made its mark by claiming to be “based on a true story.” The claim set the franchise apart from typical haunted house blockbusters, as it drew major inspiration from the real-life case files of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. And the marketing worked, because what began as a single film in 2013 has now grown into a multimedia franchise worth over $2.3 billion.

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Ed and Lorraine have both since passed, but the Warrens, played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in the movies, spent decades documenting cases of alleged hauntings, possessions, and demonic activity. Over the years, the films have attempted to juggle these historical details with audience expectations of the genre, while raising the stakes with each subsequent movie. With The Conjuring: Last Rites now officially part of the saga, it’s the perfect time to look back at the stories that inspired each entry and investigate where the movies stretch the truth.

1) The Conjuring

The real Perron family’s story began in 1971 when they moved into an old farmhouse in Rhode Island. The strangeness started with family members reporting hearing voices and smelling a foul stench, but these events eventually became such a concern that the family reached out to Ed and Lorraine, who, upon visit, concluded that the paranormal perpetrator was Bathsheba Sherman, a 19th-century woman accused of witchcraft.

The movie depicts a climactic exorcism, but Andrea Perron, the family’s eldest daughter later wrote about their experiences in her memoir “House of Darkness House of Light.” According to her, no literal exorcism ever took place, but there was a séance, where Andrea claims to have seen her mother speaking in tongues and levitating in her chair. The family ultimately moved away in 1980. While local graveyards do contain headstones with Sherman’s name, historical records don’t support the film’s claims about child sacrifice or cursed land.

2) The Conjuring 2

The second film jumps across the Atlantic to the famous Enfield Poltergeist case, which unfolded in London. Real single mother Peggy Hodgson called the cops when she heard banging in her daughters’ room. She claimed to see furniture slide across the floor and that a curtain attempted to stangle her. What’s weirder is that the cops corroborated her story, filing their own reports after witnessing chairs move on their own. Things reached a breaking point when 11-year-old Janet claimed to be possessed, speaking in the voice of Bill Wilkins, a man who had died in the home years earlier. Ed and Lorraine Warren traveled to Enfield to observe, with a featurette for The Conjuring 2 citing the case as one of the most terrifying encounters of the pair’s career.

The real haunting lasted nearly 18 months and ended without a cinematic climax. In contrast, the movie condenses events into a tight timeline and reimagines the story as a showdown with the demon Valak, a figure created for the film who went on to anchor The Nun spin-offs. The Crooked Man, another creature who menaces the children in the movie, was also a Hollywood invention. In an interview with ITV, Janet even admitted to faking some incidents “once or twice” to test whether investigators would catch her. Photographs of her mid-air, supposedly levitating, remain a topic of hot debate to this day.

3) The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

Arne Cheyenne Johnson made legal history in 1981 when his lawyers argued that demonic possession had driven him to murder. The violent case began with 11-year-old David Glatzel, who exhibited disturbing behaviors that his family attributed to something supernatural. During an exorcism by the Warrens, Johnson challenged the demon to possess him instead of David. Soon after, Johnson stabbed his landlord to death following an argument.

The trial garnered major media attention as Johnson’s defense team attempted to prove the unprovable. The Warrens even testified on his behalf, though Johnson still received a conviction for manslaughter and served five years. The film expands the already sensational case into an elaborate conspiracy involving Satanic cults and witchcraft, which added a fun folk horror bend but has no basis in the facts of the case.

4) The Conjuring: Last Rites

The recently released Conjuring finale draws from the real case of the Smurl family, which many consider one of the darkest in the Warrens’ career. Jack and Janet Smurl moved into a Pennsylvania duplex in 1973. Almost immediately, they reported occurrences: odors with no source, unexplained pounding in patterns of three, screams, and shadowy figures. The family claimed that one of their daughters was thrown down the stairs, and that Jack himself endured physical and sexual assaults by a demonic entity. Local priests were brought in, but nothing worked.

Because of the media attention, the Warrens were eventually alerted. Ed and Lorraine claimed they documented disturbing evidence during their overnight investigations, including growls, levitations, and violent attacks. Several exorcisms were performed under the approval of their bishop, but each attempt failed. Ultimately, the Smurls only found peace after leaving their home in 1988. Unlike the clear resolutions often seen on screen, the real-life haunting dragged on for 15 years without a satisfying conclusion.

Without the Smurl family, there may be no Conjuring franchise at all. The case was first fictionalized in the 1991 made-for-TV movie The Haunted, which was Jack Smurl’s own account of what happened. In an interview with Daily Dead, Michael Chaves (director of Devil Made Me Do It and Last Rites) claimed that the TV movie is actually what introduced James Wan (director of the first two Conjuring films) to the Warrens and their cases in the first place.

Which Conjuring case do you think is the scariest in real life? Let us know in the comments below.

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