One of the more obnoxious peccadilloes of modern horror movie marketing is the insistence that everything is based on true stories. Numerous movie sites, used to regurgitating press releases, have parroted the “true story” behind The Conjuring, Annabelle and now The Conjuring 2, remolding Ed and Lorraine Warren from dubious attention-seekers into frontline warriors in an ongoing paranormal war with demons.
Now a new featurette for The Conjuring 2 is hoping to pull the same bullshit again, purporting to reveal the “true story” behind the Enfield poltergeist:
The featurette includes interviews with Janet Hodgson, Margaret Hodgson and Lorraine Warren, plus the movie’s cast and crew. It uncritically treats the Enfield haunting, which occurred when Janet was 11 and Margaret 13, as a real supernatural incident.
In reality, Janet has admitted to hoaxing elements of the haunting, telling the Daily Mirror that she and Margaret had staged some of the phenomena (while continuing to claim that the majority was genuinely supernatural). Video cameras in the house caught Janet bending spoons and banging a broom handle on the ceiling in an effort to fake ghostly activity.
But these were young girls looking for attention, it’s the so-called paranormal investigators who bear the bulk of the blame. Society for Psychical Research members Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair maintained that the incidents were genuine, even after catching Janet Hodgson in the act on several occasions. Playfair’s publication of This House is Haunted: The True Story of a Poltergeist should be enough evidence to reveal his true motives in enabling the staged behavior.
As for Ed and Lorraine Warren, the paranormal investigators played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga in The Conjuring movies, there’s sufficient evidence and testimony, including from other practitioners and genuine believers, to dismiss their accounts of ghostly experiences.
For their book The Devil in Connecticut, the Warrens described their exorcism of the mentally ill David Glatzel, a story of demonic entanglement that the Glatzel family now rejects.
“My brother 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.” David’s brother Carl Glatzel said. “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.”
Similar allegations have been made about their most famous case, the Amityville horror, with William Weber, defense lawyer to murderer and former Amityville horror house occupant Ronald DeFeo Jr., said that he concocted the entire story with the “haunted” family. "I know this book is a hoax. We created this horror story over many bottles of wine.”
The admission changed nothing for Ed and Lorraine Warren, who allegedly pushed similar fabrications in many of their other cases. According to Ray Garton, a horror author who worked with the Warrens during their “Haunting in Connecticut” case, he went to Ed with doubts about the eyewitnesses, who couldn’t seem to keep their stories straight.
“‘They're crazy,’" Garton said Ed Warren told him, "‘All the people who come to us are crazy, that's why they come to us. Just use what you can and make the rest up. You write scary books, right? Well, make it up and make it scary. That's why we hired you.’”
It’s easy to see why studios would want to perpetuate the fiction that their horror movies are based in fact, though it’s less clear why the film press at large continues to go along with it. Perhaps as this same trend expands outward — until action movies are claiming Arnold really did kill those terrorists and sci-fi insists FTL drives are a true story in a world immediately parallel to ours — we’ll eventually reach a point where credulity is too strained and we can return to movies being shiny deceptions once more.
