The Warrens only really became household names back in 2013 with the release of James Wan’s original The Conjuring, but the truth is that the late duo of paranormal investigators had been researching all things supernatural for decades before being immortalized on the big screen by the perfectly cast Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
Of course, that’s not to say that the Warrens didn’t have a hand in shaping the horror genre before Warner Bros invested in the Conjuringverse, as the couple’s extensive casefiles have inspired countless scary movies over the years – some which you might not even know were based on allegedly true stories. And in honor of The Conjuring: Last Rites giving the current incarnation of the franchise a highly profitable farewell while still embracing the series’ emotional core, I think it might be fun to look back on cinematic history of The Warrens outside of the Conjuring movies.
For those unfamiliar with the couple’s history, Ed was a self-taught demonologist and Lorraine claimed to have been born with mediumistic abilities, and both of them were brought up Catholic in Connecticut. The duo met and fell in love as teenagers, marrying in 1945 and having a daughter a year later. Despite being interested in the subject from an early age, they only began to publicly investigate the paranormal in 1952, when the couple founded the New England Society for Psychic Research in the hopes of learning more about the supernatural while also helping those suffering from alleged hauntings.
And with over 10,000 cases under their belts, it’s no surprise that the Warrens also had a massive impact on popular culture. Their books and interviews became the backbone for future investigators who wished to study the paranormal more seriously while also becoming the basis basis for countless works of fiction meant to profit off our collective fascination with scary stories. For instance, the Raggedy Anne haunting that gave us Annabelle was also indirectly responsible for several haunted doll movies throughout the 1980s thanks to the publication of Gerald Brittle’s The Demonologist, a book chronicling the Warrens’ exploits.
Of course, Brittle’s book was only a hit because the Warrens were already recognized as professional ghost hunters who helped people in need due to the highly publicized Lutz haunting and its incredibly popular big-screen adaptation. Popularly known as the Amityville Horror case, this New York haunting began in 1975 after the Lutz family moved into a suburban home that had previously been the site of a gruesome mass murder. The Warrens only became involved with the case in March of 1976, when they invited a Channel Five television crew to accompany them as they spent a night investigating the house.
This investigation would only result in a single eerie photograph allegedly revealing an otherworldly boy staring at the investigators from the bottom of a staircase, but the renewed media attention was enough to spark a national wave of interest in what had previously only been covered by tabloids. Funnily enough, both Jay Anson’s best-selling recount of the haunting and its big-screen adaptation omit the Warrens from the story entirely, focusing instead on the Lutz family’s nightmarish ordeal while incorporating backstory that the Warren investigation uncovered later on.
It was only in 1991 that we saw a horror production incorporate Ed and Lorraine Warren into a film as actual characters, and that was in Robert Mandel’s made-for-TV thriller The Haunted. Based on 1988’s The Haunted: One Family’s Nightmare (co-written by Robert Curran, Jack Smurl, Janet Smurl, Ed Warren, and Lorraine Warren), the film was a more grounded retelling of the same events that would later inspire this year’s The Conjuring: Last Rites.
In the film, the Warrens were portrayed by Diane Baker (who you may remember as Senator Ruth Martin from The Silence of the Lambs) and Stephen Markle as a kind couple willing to risk their own safety for the benefit of others, but they were still far from the ghostbusting heroes that we see in the Conjuring films. In fact, with the exception of a handful of docudramas that we’ll touch on later in this article, The Haunted is the most believable adaptation of the Warren’s casefiles to date – which is likely why it’s still such an effective horror film over three decades later.
In 2002, another made-for-TV production would incorporate the Warrens into the story with John Kavanaugh’s infamous docudrama A Haunting in Connecticut. Based on the paranormal experiences described by the Snedeker family after they moved into a house that had previously served as a funeral home, this thrilling documentary hybrid actually invited Lorraine Warren herself to speak about the events and provide viewers with some context about the origins of the phenomenon.
The success of the program (which was actually my first introduction to the Warrens) resulted in an expansion of “A Haunting” into a full-blown series over on the Discovery Channel. Lorraine even consulted on several episodes based on the Warren casefiles, something she’d go on to do in several documentaries and reality TV shows in the future. And in 2009, Lionsgate decided to adapt the original TV special into a feature film, though much like the Amityville adaptation (and its 2005 remake), the movie removed the Warrens from the plot entirely while still using the results of their investigation as the basis for the haunting’s backstory.
This would mark the end of the Warrens’ direct influence on supernatural horror productions until the rise of the Conjuring movies, but the couple itself has also served as inspiration for a series of fictional paranormal investigators in other media – with parodies skyrocketing in popularity once Wilson and Farmiga’s portrayal of the couple turned them into ghostbusting rock stars. From the Bergers in the WNUF Halloween Special to the clairvoyant Elise Rainier of the Insidious franchise (who even owns a dog named Warren), there are countless examples of off-brand Warrens investigating supernatural phenomena in film, with some portrayals coming off as less flattering than others. Hell, we’ll likely even see a humorous take on the Warrens in the upcoming Scary Movie 6, as you simply can’t discuss the current era of mainstream horror media without bringing up the duo that brought down Annabelle.
And while Warner Bros. insists that it’ll continue to pump out more Conjuring-related media in the form of prequels and spin-offs despite Last Rites graciously allowing the fictionalized couple to ride off into the metaphorical sunset, I’d argue that the best case scenario for the franchise would be to take a break for a couple of decades before bringing both Farmiga and Wilson back as older and wiser ghost hunters ready to investigate one final case.
The post Beyond ‘The Conjuring’ – A History of Ed & Lorraine Warren in Movies & Television appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
