One of the most successful horror movies of all time, ninth franchise installment The Conjuring: Last Rites adapts the real-life haunting of the Smurl family in the 1970s, another case plucked from the files of Ed and Lorraine Warren. But Last Rites isn’t the first movie to adapt the allegedly true story. That honor belongs to 1991 TV movie, The Haunted.
Luiz H.C. explained right here on Bloody Disgusting last month, “The Smurl case became such an infamous incident that it spawned a surprisingly effective TV movie back in 1991, with Robert Mandel’s The Haunted even going on to inspire James Wan’s first Conjuring film.”
Yes, 34 years before The Conjuring: Last Rites, the 1991 made-for-television haunter brought the very same story to the screen, but The Haunted has largely fallen by the wayside over the years. Like many TV movies of the time, it hasn’t yet received any sort of physical media release, nor will you find the 1991 movie on any streaming services you might have.
But The Haunted has popped up in full over on YouTube, which is at the moment the only place you can actually even watch the movie. Unless you taped it off TV at the time, of course.
So is it worth watching? Bloody Disgusting contributor Emily von Seele is a fan. She wrote back in May, “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.”
In Emily’s words, “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.”
Enter demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, played in The Haunted by Stephen Markle and Diane Baker. It marked the first time the real-life paranormal experts were turned into horror movie characters, decades before Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga brought them to the big screen in James Wan’s The Conjuring and its many spinoffs and sequels.
“This movie scared the living hell out of me,” Emily von Seele writes of The Haunted. She adds, “I am thrilled to report that The Haunted really holds up over 30 years later.”
You can watch 1991’s The Haunted on YouTube below.