The true story behind ‘The Conjuring’
Any horror movie that bills itself as being ‘based on a true story’ is open to interpretation, with The Conjuring just one of many to have marketed itself as the dramatisation of events that genuinely transpired.
Of course, whether or not anyone chooses to accept there’s even the tiniest sliver of truth is dependent entirely on their belief in the supernatural, but the fact the franchise would go on to become the highest-grossing multi-film series in the history of the horror genre would make it patently clear that its veracity hasn’t impacted its success.
Ed and Lorrain Warren themselves – as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga – were regularly dubbed liars, frauds, and grifters after they carved out a career from descending upon the scenes of many unexplainable incidents and offering their assessment that ghostly shenanigans were afoot.
Again, that’s entirely open to debate based on how much stock a person puts in the feasibility of otherworldly goings-on, but at the very least, The Conjuring was indebted to the ordeal that befell the Perron family in the early 1970s when they became convinced their home was under repeated attack by malevolent spirits.
The clan moved into a large farmhouse in January of 1971 when eerie things began occurring. Such jaw-dropping phenomena as a missing broom and small piles of dirt being found all over their property somehow conspired to get even more unsettling still. Matriarch Carolyn Perron did her own research and discovered that the home had previously resided in the same family for multiple generations, many of whom died painful or mysterious deaths.
One such spirit called itself Bathsheba, and it transpired that a person named Bathsheba Sherman had lived on the property in the 1800s and was rumoured to have involvement in the occult, a coincidence that could have in no way been uncovered during the research conducted by Carolyn herself – or anybody else – and then used to perpetuate a hoax of any kind.
The Warrens would make repeated visits to the Perron homestead – presumably being financially rewarded for their time on each occasion – with multiple seances yielding possession, speaking in tongues, and more than one toppled-over chair. As it turns out, all they had to do was leave, with the family upping sticks and relocating to a new residence in 1980, when the hauntings suddenly stopped.
Of course, director James Wan upped the ante significantly by adding in plenty of jump scares and demonic deities to increase the fear factor, but the Warrens continued to be fertile ground after The Conjuring 2 took its cues from the Enfield poltergeist, while third instalment The Devil Made Me Do It focused on the trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, the accused in the first legal case in the history of the United States that tried to pin a murder charge on demonic possession.
