Any of us who have ever watched an episode of a legal show on television from Perry Mason to law and order are very familiar with the

idea of the insanity defense when the accused claims they didn't know right from wrong when they

committed the crime they were charged for. They might claim to have been mentally ill for years

or perhaps they just snapped, lost control of themselves and did something terrible they wouldn't otherwise have done.

But in 1981, a young man in Connecticut took the idea of the insanity plea to the next level.

He claimed he was innocent of the murder he'd committed. He'd only done it

because he was possessed by a demon. And this became the story that inspired the third film in the

Conjuring series. Well, the third film featuring the Adventures of Ed and Lorraine Warren

anyway. There were a bunch of

Annabelle and Nunn movies mixed in there too. Anyway, while the previous two films took the

intrepid duo to haunted houses, this was a new kind of horror story for the pair. And while the

film takes the demon plot and runs pretty wild with it

in the last half of the movie, the first half is loosely based on the real story of the first time

that demonic possession was brought up as a defense in a U.S. court. The film begins with Ed and

Lorraine Morin, played once again by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farminga

at the exorcism of an eight-year-old boy named David Glatzel, although in real life David was 11.

The exorcism is attended by his family, his older sister Debbie, her boyfriend, Arnie Johnson, and Father Gordon in Brookfield, Connecticut.

As things seem to go awry, Arnie, hoping to save David's life, invites the demon to enter his body instead.

Ed witnesses the demon inner Arnie at the same time, and the demon causes Ed to suffer a heart

attack because, you know, it could only be a demon that caused it. Not all the red meat, beer,

lack of exercise. Yep, got to be a demon. Anyway, after a hospital stay, Ed learns that

Arnie has become, well, like a different person.

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