The Devil made me do it
With the reality of stabbing his landlord multiple times dawning on him, Arne Johnson, in the recent horror-thriller “The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It”, admits while sitting in a police holding cell, that he is the one to blame for the murder.
“I invited this thing into me, and that's the reason that he's dead. So, you know, whatever happens to me, I've got it coming,” says Ruairi O'Connor, who plays the 19-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson in the movie, with tears rolling down his cheeks.
Debbie Glatzel, Johnson’s girlfriend at the time and played by Sarah Catherine Hook in the movie, offers some consolation to Johnson, convincing him that he was somehow taken over by another entity.
“No, you don't. Look, I was there. Whatever is going on, whatever happened that day, that was not Arne.”
The movie follows the real-life story of Johnson who had stabbed and killed his landlord, 40-year-old Alan Bono of Brookfield in early 1981. The case later became infamous after Johnson claimed in court that the devil had made him carry out the deed.
The movie itself, however, is another chapter in the long chain of movies based on the exploits of the ghost hunting, husband and wife duo Ed and Lorraine Warren, captured with great creative liberty and reasonable acting and directing in the Conjuring and Insidious series.
The third instalment in The Conjuring series has been directed by Michael Chaves, whose only previous feature-length directorial credit includes the critically panned The Curse of La Llorona – albeit that movie too belongs in the same universe in which The Conjuring and Insidious movies are based.
The movie starts by following the possession – or as we later learn the cursing of - 11-year-old David Glatzel, Debbie’s younger brother and then how the possession or curse is transferred to Johnson.
Later, it is discovered that there is more at play than just demon possession. Departing from history into fantasy, the movie claims that there is Satan worshipping and the occult involved as well.
The real Brookfield case was one of the more popular cases where lawyers attempted to use demonic possession as a defence for a heinous crime. What added weight to the case was that this was one of the first known instances where the clergy was officially involved in investigating the case and at some point in the ensuing trial were due to sit in the witness box.
While the lawyers were not ultimately given any chance to either prove or disprove the concept of possession and its implications in a court of law, it helped bring a fringe concept into mainstream discourse.
Of course, the topic was already in public discourse at the time due to the presence of other wildly popular films that explored the theme of possession by ghosts or demons. The real-life duo of Ed and Lorraine Warren too had been working in their field of the paranormal and demonology for around 30 years at the time.
Superior Court Judge Robert J. Callahan may have poured cold water on any attempts to legally prove a paranormal possession but one has to wonder why that could not be so.
Ed Warren, played brilliantly by Patrick Wilson, at one point in the movie tells Ashley LeConte Campbell, who is playing Waterbury lawyer Martin J. Minnella (renamed in the movie as Meryl), that: “The court accepts the existence of God every time a witness swears to tell the truth. I think it's about time they accept the existence of the devil”.
Cultures and religions across the world have a deep belief in the paranormal and or the metaphysical. This is one reason why, as Ed rightly points out, that even courts accept the presence of or faith in at least one supernatural entity – God.
Judges in our part of the world have often been known to cite not only God’s existence but also bank on divine laws in searching for meaning and guidance in several cases. Yet, acceptance of the paranormal as a legitimate and legal cause for occurrences is ruled and excluded from our laws.
We acknowledge the existence of and accept the Quran as sacrosanct and the provider of divine law – the basis of all laws in our part of the world. Yet, we do not accept actions attributed to entities mentioned in this sacred of texts.
One particular case is of interest in this regard. Dating from 1963, it is the sentencing and subsequent appeal of an exorcist in the Madras High Court after he attempted to exorcise evil from a young woman but who suffocated in the process apart from suffering severe burns and lacerations to her body.
The appellate court noted “It is not claimed for the prosecution that the accused intended to cause the death of the woman, or even to do her any grave injury. However, deluded he might have been, the accused was under the genuine impression that the woman was possessed by an evil spirit and that he could exorcise her effectively by means of this prolonged ritual.”
The court ended up rescinding the life in prison sentence awarded to the exorcist by the sessions court and instead sentenced him to spend three years of rigorous imprisonment.
The Madras High Court, much like Superior Court Judge Callahan, considered the material evidence, testimonies and excluded the possibility of an otherworldly entity unexplainable by science.
The belief in black magic, the occult and the existence of djinns and unclean spirits is quite strong in the eastern culture and religions including Islam and Hinduism.
Indeed, as a subject, this was broached in much greater detail in the 1973 cult classic, The Exorcist. Credited with really bringing demonic possessions into the mainstream discourse and sparking off an entire generation of movies and graphic novels surrounding the idea of possession by an external force.
There is even a homage to The Exorcist in the first act of the movie as Steve Coulter (playing Father Newman) arrives at the Glatzel house to discover that David is possessed and requires an exorcism. As he steps out of the cab, he stands before the house in the light of an adjoining street lamp, much the same way Max von Sydow did when playing as Father Merrin in the 1973 classic.
While the faithful around the world acknowledge the presence of evil and the malicious – just as much as they acknowledge the presence of the “Good” and the “Benevolent” perhaps as the necessary counterweight to even describe righteousness, what they cannot explain is how that comes to pass or how is it that people can suddenly speak in a multitude of voices, possess hitherto little known knowledge or a different language previously unexposed to or exhibit powers of telekinesis or extreme strength.
Even science – some practitioners of which now exist at the crossroads of reason and faith - are also at a loss to explain just how can a person be “infected” or taken over by a largely invisible entity from perhaps another dimension.
Dr Mark Albanese, who studied medicine at Cornell and has been practising psychiatry for decades, once wrote about his colleague, Yale-educated and board-certified psychiatrist Dr Richard Gallagher - who teaches at Columbia University and New York Medical College and has consulted on numerous exorcisms, claiming that people have a “spiritual dimension” as well and one which must be taken into consideration when treating patients claiming possession.
It is unclear how the “spiritual dimension” is defined or what it may contain, gain access to “our” tangible dimension. Whether the demonic is part of the spiritual dimension or another dimension altogether and whether crossings can be a trigger or whether there are doorways or rifts between these dimensions and who and how can travel across them be achieved.
Dr Frank Pastore from Peekskill New York in his letter in the New Oxford Review wrote that in soft sciences — such as psychiatry — measurements become limited.
“As Harry Stack Sullivan pointed out regarding psychiatric phenomena, the observer influences the observed, and one’s findings must be held cautiously,” he warns, adding that the marginalization of religion in modern times has encouraged even honest scientists to dismiss phenomena involving the supernatural.
He recommends being scientific enough to be open to the possibility that in some cases of mental illness the diabolic may be involved.
Indeed, there is still a lot that science has yet to decipher about the human mind and its workings. However, even if we are to decipher that, it is still a mystery how can a demonic “infection” of the spiritual dimension impact a human’s physical dimension and allow them to speak in different languages, voices and even obtain super strength, levitate, perform telekinesis to move around objects and affect the environment around them. Further, what is the matter that a soul is composed of (humans are made of carbon and nitrogen-based flesh and bones) – or better yet – a demon comprise?
In the film, however, our protagonists are also confronted with another conundrum. The demon, having possessed Johnson, has since left him. This is proved when the Warrens ask Arne to read a passage from the Bible. When Arne reads the passage without any encumbrances, Lorraine exclaims disappointedly that he is not possessed.
These religious objects would've been enough to provoke an inhuman spirit if there was one present, she says.
To this, a confused Father Newman asks: Does that mean he's not possessed?
A frustrated Ed Warren responds by saying: The fact that he can read from the Bible just seals it.
To Jonhson’s question of whether he is just plain “crazy”, Ed retorts: “Well, you're not possessed. But that doesn't mean that you weren't”.
The exchange suggests a new possibility of demons or evil spirits possessing and de-possessing people almost at will. And if that is the case, why are not more people possessed?
The movie, though, throws up at least one way to have some sort of communication with the demonic dimension and be able to bring them into the spiritual dimension through the practice of the occult.
John Noble, who plays Father Kastner in the movie wherein he is approached by the Warrens to help them with their case because he had experience in breaking up a satanic cult – tells the husband and wife duo how defiling holy land with rituals and committing acts of blasphemy granted them power which they used against those persecuting them. In The Exorcist, the demon was apparently trapped in a statute in the ruins of Babylon.
In the film, the Warrens manage to solve a related crime in a different county to secure the evidence to convince the courts while Lorraine manages to defeat the occultist by destroying her altar. The demon summoned devours the occultist’s soul, treating it as currency for an unfulfilled promise.
In the real world, and the movie, Johnson is convicted and sentenced. Legally, demonic or occultist practices are ruled out as the reason for murdering a middle-aged man.
Scientifically – as explored in The Exorcist – no logical reason for possession exists so far. Split personality and psychosis, misdiagnosed for long as possession can be deciphered but there remains, even amongst doctors and people of science - that there are those rare cases where even science fails to explain.
The Conjuring 3 – The Devil Made Me Do It, thus offers another fantastic exploration of the intersection between this world and the spiritual dimension along with the possibilities of what the occult can theoretically do with some brilliant storytelling and acting by the two leads Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.