Now that big-budget mashups of I Love The ’80s are all the rage, James Wan—a director who knows a hit franchise (or low-hanging fruit, for that matter) when he sees it—plans to do the same for the next Conjuring movie. Speaking to IGN, the director says he’s already got the next paranormal case for supernatural super-agents Ed and Lorraine Warren picked out, but he’s not saying which one. He does give this hint: “[The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2] are both set in the ’70s, I think Conjuring 3 has got to be set in the ’80s.”
That does narrow things down a bit. Both of the Conjuring movies released so far were based on actual cases from the Warrens’ files, so it stands to reason that the third one will be, too. So, which hauntings did Ed and Lorraine Warren investigate in the ‘80s? To Wikipedia!:
First, there’s the case of Arne Johnson, who attempted to plead not guilty by reason of demonic possession in his trial for the killing of his landlord in 1981. The Warrens were involved in the case beginning several months earlier, where they exorcised Johnson’s fiancee’s younger brother of a supposed demon. During the ritual, the demon purportedly left 11-year-old David Glatzel’s body and jumped into Johnson’s, and forced the man to kill his landlord months later:
Then there’s the Smurl family, whose decade-long tangle with demons in their Pennsylvania home—the Warrens came in to investigate in 1986—was adapted into the 1991 made-for-TV movie The Haunted, which was co-written by the Warrens:
And finally, there’s the Snedeker house, a former funeral home that was reportedly the site of some pretty intense paranormal activity in the mid-’80s. Ed and Lorraine Warren visited it in 1986, and declared afterwards that former employees had engaged in necromancy and necrophilia back when it was a funeral home, thus the demons. The Snedekers’ story has already been dramatized in the 2009 movie A Haunting In Connecticut, episodes of the cable series A Haunting and Paranormal Witness, and this 1992 episode of Sally Jessy Raphael called “I Was Raped By A Ghost”:
Stay classy, Sally.
Ray Garton, who co-authored a book about the Snedecker case with the Warrens, later claimed that Ed had instructed him to leave out evidence that the haunting was a hoax and play up the more sensational details to make the story more frightening. But that just sounds like good horror storytelling to us.