The Real Story Behind 10 "Based On A True Story" Horror Films
5. The Haunting In Connecticut
The pitch: Starring Virginia Madsen and Peter Donovan as a down on their luck couple who rent a new family home that turns out to be a former mortuary full of active and aggressive spirits, 2009 "psychological horror" The Haunting in Connecticut is another film that wears its "based on true events" tag all over its poster. Inspired by a famous case for the most famous ghost hunters in America, it claims to show what a real haunting is like. The real story: Based on an investigation from Ed and Lorraine Warren, the famous paranormal investigators making far from their last appearance on this list, The Haunting in Connecticut is inspired by events that occurred in Southington, Connecticut in 1986. The Snedeker family (fictionalised as the Campbells in the film) reported poltergeist-type activity in their home. The Warrens declared the former funeral home's morticians to have been necromancers and necrophiles and performed an exorcism. The Warrens' role in the film is taken by a priest, Elias Koteas as Father Nicholas Popescu, who also suggests that the morticians were necromancers. There is a more grandiose climax in which the spirits are released through a house full of corpses and a blazing inferno, but the earlier part of the story is a fairly reasonable recreation of the events as described in the Warrens' 1992 book In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting. The truth behind the book, however, is that it isn't truth at all. Mostly actually written by prolific horror fiction author Ray Garton, it was described by Garton as "the low point in my career" as he continues to debate the book's dubious "non-fiction" status. All the stories he was told to compile in the book with were rife with inconsistencies. Garton described the Snedekers as struggling with alcohol and drug addiction and unable to keep their story straight. He would go on to say that Ed Warren had told him that "all the people that come to us are crazy" and to "make it up and make it scary".
