‘The Haunted’: The Childhood Terror That Adapted the Smurl Haunting 34 Years Before ‘The Conjuring’

When I was nine years old, I saw a movie on television that would have a lasting effect on my life. That film was The Haunted – a made for TV movie about a family who suffered the effects of a demonic infestation in their house. I had a friend over and we were eating pizza when we saw a commercial for the movie, which announced that it would be starting in just a few minutes. We decided to ditch our plans of watching TGIF reruns and watch this instead. Our parents were out and we had been left to our own devices, so what better way to spend a Friday night than by watching a movie that most certainly would have been off limits if the parents had known anything about it?

The 1991 made-for-TV horror movie tells the purportedly true story of Jack and Janet Smurl and their family. In the late 1970s, they move into a duplex in West Pittston, Pennsylvania with Jack, Janet and their children occupying one side, and Jack’s elderly parents occupying the other. They experience a few strange occurrences surrounding the move – tools and other items suddenly going missing, hearing family members call out for one another, only to realize that the person speaking was nowhere nearby.

Eventually, that calms down and the family is able to enjoy life in their new home.

A few years later, the occurrences start up again, but this time, they are impossible to ignore. Janet hears knocks in the walls and whispering when she is alone in the house, a chandelier falls and almost kills one of the children and both Jack and Janet experience the physical sensation of a presence touching them. When the Catholic Church is no help, they reach out to noted demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Stephen Markle and Diane Baker), who would later be the focal point of James Wan’s The Conjuring series.

This year’s The Conjuring: Last Rites, in fact, tells the story of the Smurl family haunting.

This movie scared the living hell out of me. My parents were pretty strict with what I watched, so I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to horror, and this was the most intense thing I had seen to date. There is a particular scene that has stuck in my mind ever since – Janet is alone in the living room and she sees the demon manifest itself as a dark, billowy shadow. It is faceless and formless, but you get the distinct impression that it is watching her. Regarding her. After a few moments, it crosses the room and disappears when it reaches the wall. That scene terrified me. In my young mind, ghosts wore sheets or maybe were transparent versions of the people they had been in life. This was something completely otherworldly. I remember lying awake in the nights following the viewing, staring through my open bedroom door and into the well-lit hallway, where I was certain I would eventually see the shadowy figure appear.

As impactful as this movie was, it wasn’t something that I could easily revisit as I got older. Made for television movies are a corner of horror that is not as readily available as theatrical films, especially when they came from the era before streaming video. I remember scouring our local video store to see if I could find it on VHS, but had no luck. When Shudder added The Haunted to their always stellar list of offerings several years back, I immediately took the opportunity to revisit it. I was immediately transported back to my family’s living room, experiencing the first scares of what would become a lifelong love affair with horror cinema and ghost stories.

I am thrilled to report that The Haunted really holds up over 30 years later. Sure, it might not be on same level of intensity as modern horror, but it can still hold its own. Like any good haunting story, pacing is important, and here, director Robert Mandel makes good use of the slow increase in ghostly activity in order to set the stage and hook the audience. It flows smoothly, is carried well by the cast (led by Sally Kirkland and Jeffrey DeMunn), and has some legitimately creepy elements. The scene that frightened me as a child remains one of the most impactful moments in the film. The effects are simple, but surprisingly effective. Every shadow stands out, every whisper can be heard and the sound design brings some well-timed bass hits that really give the scary moments an unearthly quality. It’s one that I would definitely recommend  – particularly if you are a fan of The Conjuring films and can’t wait for Last Rites this September.

In fact, looking back on it, The Haunted had a much bigger impact than just a few sleepless nights. It was the first time of many that my path would intersect with stories of Warrens. Several years later, I was in the library and I saw the book by Robert Curran that this movie had been adapted from. I checked it out and took it home (to this day I still can’t understand why my dad, a staunch Catholic and hater of anything horror-related) let me do that. But I was able to reacquaint myself with the terrors of the Smurl Haunting and the work of Ed and Lorraine. When I was in college, I caught an episode of A Haunting on the Discovery channel that focused on another of the Warrens’ cases, known as “A Haunting in Connecticut” (not the 2009 movie, but based on the same story). Years later, James Wan announced that he was developing The Conjuring, a movie that would be based on one of the case files of the Warrens. As we all know, the film was a massive success and went on to spawn sequels, spin-offs and a new universe of horror stories.

I find it fascinating that Ed and Lorraine Warren have been a part of the modern horror scene for so long. Their cases had been a part of the landscape long before Wan developed his film series, and will no doubt continue to be a part of it for years to come. Whether you believe in the history of these events or not, it’s clear that these stories have made an impact. They have inspired a number of filmmakers and storytellers, and their cases have been responsible for keeping countless horror fans terrified and hiding under their covers at night – in 1991 and in 2025.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on June 7, 2019.

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