The Haunting in Connecticut, a horror movie that opens this weekend, is being promoted with a poster and TV ads built around an image of a boy who appears to have tobacco leaves three times the size of his lead sprouting from his mouth. My first impression of this image was that the movie must have been made as part of a tax write-off scheme and that the publicity department, knowing that the film was meant to fail and understanding that they weren't expected to attract people to the theater, were having a little fun, but it turns out that a lot of people think that it's one selling ad. The intended reaction is, what the hell is supposed to be going on there!? Or, more precisely, because Haunting is touted as being "based on true events", what the hell is supposed to have been really going on there!?
It seems clear that a significant percentage of the audience for scary entertainment gets a charge out of hearing that whatever's freezing their marrow is "true"--or, at least, "based on a true story", or in the case of the just shamelessly fraudulent, "inspired by actual events." Last year, Brian Bertino's The Strangers was promoted with the "inspired" line; in interviews, Bertino revealed that the inspiration in question came from his having read Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Manson murders, when he was a kid, and also that someone who may have been a burgler once knocked on his door. So The Strangers was inspired by true events in the sense that it's true that, in a very different era, in circumstances very different from those in Bertino's movie, people very different from the people in his film were knifed in their home by people with very different motivations than those assigned to Bertino's masked creeps. And that if you've been reading Helter Skelter and know that there are some crazy sumbitches with knives running around out there somewhere, hearing a knock on the door can really freak you out. But the existence of psychos with knives is a well-established fact. Movies about supernatural events that claim to be somehow rooted in actual events are another kettle of fish, right?
As with so much else, your standards of veracity here may depend on how much you want to believe--or, if you're a filmmaker, how much you stand to gain in box-office revenue and media attention if you have a weird story that you can peddle as true. The Haunting in Connecticut purports to tell the story of the Snedeker family (called the Campbells in the movie), who in 1986 moved into a house in Southington, Connecticut to be close to a hospital at Yale University, where one of the two sons was receiving treatment for cancer. The boys moved into the basement, which had previously been used as a mortuary, and became witness to all manner of ghostly visitors--presumably, ghosts who either had complaints about their embalming or had enjoyed the process so much that they were reluctant to leave. The story was turned into a book, In a Dark Place, by horror novelist Ray Garton, who worked in concert with the Snedekers and Ed and Lorraine Warren, a married team of paranormal investigators who had looked into the case and vouched for its authenticity--which is reason enough to set off the screaming red light on the bullshit detector.
The Warrens, you see, had a hand in the granddaddy of bullshit "true" paranormal stories, that of "the Amityville Horror." That particular load began in November 1974, when 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered his parents and four siblings in the Long Island home where they had lived since 1965. DeFeo, who was known to use heroin and LSD, first tried to convince the police that his family had been wiped out by a Mafia contract killer before confessing to the murders himself; he was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years to life, despite his lawyer's plea of insanity. A year later, George and Kathy Lutz and their family moved into the DeFeos' house. They lived there about a year, which turned out to be just enough time to gather the "experiences" that, embellished and augmented by the author's imagination, were plowed by Jay Anson into the 1977 bestseller The Amityville Horror. Reviewing the 1979 movie, which shocked the shit out of everyone involved in it by becoming one of the biggest hits of the year, Veronica Geng wrote that the filmmakers "had to add the horror" and that the book, which tries to make your skin crawl by recalling how the Lutzes were tormented by flies in the house in winter and the haunting sounds of a "German marching band tuning up", "should have been called The Amityville Nuisance.
For the Lutzes, the real Amityville nuisance turned out to be Ronald DeFeo's lawyer, William Weber, who published an article claiming that he and the Lutzes had jointly come up with the idea of concocting a haunting hoax and worked out the outline of what became Anson's book "over many bottles of wine." The idea was to provide a pretext for Weber to appeal DeFeo's case while giving the Lutzes a chance to break away from a house they now realized they couldn't afford, a make a bundle in the process. When the Lutzes sued Weber, the judge threw out the case, saying, "Based on what I have heard, it appears to me that to a large extent the book is a work of fiction, relying in a large part upon the suggestions of Mr. Weber." Kathy Lutz died in 2004, and George died in 2006. He continued to maintain that the book was "mostly true", although he remained vague about the not-mostly part that wasn't and declined to give details about just what happened the night the family claimed to have fled the house for good, saying that it was all "too frightening". (It would have to be better than the 1979 movie, which climaxes with everybody piling into the car and starting to drive away in a heavy rainstorm, only to have George go back on foot to collect the dog and falling through a hole in the floor into a pool of evil-looking black goop.) In 2003, George's stepson Christopher told somebody that the story was "mostly" fiction, and damned if George didn't sue him, too. Meanwhile, the house on Long Island is still there, and in the thirty-three years since the Lutzes got the hell out of Dodge, many occupants have come and gone. None of them has reported having "experienced" shit. That hasn't put a dent in the Amityville Horror industry, which now totals nine films, including direct-to-video specials, the 2005 remake of the 1979 original, and Amityville 3-D.
Compared to the story behind the more recent The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), the sheepish hucksterism of George Lutz and company seem downright adorable. Scott Derrickson's "based on a true story" film is framed as a courtroom drama starring Laura Linney as a lawyer who defends a priest (Tom Wilkinson) who performed an exorcism on a young girl who, the movie shows Linney slowing realizing, really was possessed by demons. The "true story" that this thing is based on is that of Anneliese Michel, a German woman who suffered from clinical depression and epilepsy, the symptoms of which her parents and local church authorities diagnosed as demonic possession. After almost a year at the hands of self-styled exorcists, Michel died of malnutrition and dehydration; both her parents and a pair of dipshit priests were tried and convicted of manslaughter. (This was in 1976; one thing this case and that of The Amityville Horror have in common is that neither might have happened if it hadn't been for The Exorcist.) The 2006 German film Requiem, directed by Hans-Christian Schmid and starring the talented Sandra Hüller, gives a truthful (as opposed to "based on a true story") account of the case. The on-line edition of National Review recently named Emily Rose as one of the 25 best "conservative" movies. Since I didn't vote for it, I trust that I won't take any flak for interpreting this as NR's way of saying that it's intrinsically conservative to starve your daughter to death and tell the judge that you thought it was what God would have wanted.
As for The Haunting in Connecticut, I haven't seen it yet, but Ray Garton has gotten the jump on the inevitable debunking claims, distancing himself from his own book and saying that it took considerable professional skill on his part to just craft a semi-coherent narrative from his discussions with the Snedekers because none of them could “keep their stories straight.” He also implied that drug and alcohol abuse might have been responsible for some of the "unusual" behavior, and has even implied that he's not sure the Snedekers' son was really being treated for cancer. (Meanwhile, used copies of the paperback edition of the out of print book are going for upwards of $160 on Amazon.) For her part, Lorraine Warren has complained that the movie distorts what happened to the Snedekers and that what "really" happened is actually "much scarier" that the movie. (Ed Warren died in 2006). How much you care about all this may depend on how bored you are by the real world, or maybe by whether or not you live in the house that the Snedekers vacated. No one but them has detected any paranormal activity going on, but the current inhabitants are now having to put up with what might be called the Southington Nuisance--rubberneckers who, turned on by the publicity campaign for the movie, have started invading the vicinity in hopes of seeing Bloody Mary waving at them from the attic window. The current homeowner, Susan Trotta-Smith, told a reporter that "Most people are respectful. They stay on the road. They might take a picture. But we have had a few problems with people kind of rudely coming up to the door and scaring our kids, telling them the house is haunted." Now all she has to do is slip her kids copies of Helter Skelter, and they'll be on their way to their own Hollywood careers.