The Haunting Featured in ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’ was Made Into a TV Movie 34 Years Ago (and it was terrifying in 1991)
The Haunted had a profound effect on me as a kid. Did I have a similar reaction watching it again more than three decades later?
As you might already know, The Conjuring: Last Rites is inspired by Ed and Lorraine Warren’s involvement in the Smurl family haunting. If you’re of a certain age, you might already be familiar with the story, because the family’s account of what happened in their Pennsylvania duplex was made into a television movie that first aired more than three decades ago.
Titled The Haunted, the movie was broadcast on Fox on the evening of May 6, 1991. The film was based on the book titled The Haunted: One Family’s Nightmare which was published in 1988 (not 1986 like it’s claimed in some sources). I was young when the TV movie first aired, but I watched it, and it made a huge impression on me. I rediscovered the movie somewhat recently and watched it again, but is it still as terrifying as I remembered it being? If I may, I’d like to share my own experience with The Haunted and how it haunted me for three decades.
A Haunted Personal Journey
Effective stories about ghosts and hauntings have always been able to spook me. I grew up around horror movies, but the haunted house genre is one of the few that can still get under my skin. I credit/blame a lot of that feeling on watching The Haunted when I was young. For years I couldn’t remember the specifics of the movie, I only remembered the parts that scared me the most. Remembering the scary bits with no context is probably worse than remembering the whole movie, because I built those moments up in my head without any sort of resolution.
Four things from The Haunted stuck in my mind. I could vividly recall a man being held down by a female ghost and assaulted on the floor. I remembered ghosts in old-timey clothes walking down a dark hallway. I could hear foul language coming from a basement when there was nobody there. And I repeatedly pictured a lost roll of tape being found in a refrigerator. For some reason the tape in the refrigerator is what I remembered most clearly, and, strangely, it’s what spooked me the most. Maybe because it was so relatable yet so odd? I don’t know, but occasionally over the years when I’d lose something I’d have a small twinge of fear simmering in the back of my mind that I might find it in my refrigerator.
All of those moments were burned into my brain, but I couldn’t remember what movie they came from. I couldn’t even remember the actors in the movie or the basic plot. I’d attempted to look for it every once in a while, but searching for a ghost movie with “tape in the refrigerator” never turned up anything useful. So, I eventually resigned myself to the fact that I’d always be haunted by the half-memory of a movie that existed somewhere in the ether of broadcast television.
Revisiting The Haunted 34 Years Later
Then, sometime last year, I found it. While looking for something else I stumbled across a 1991 TV movie titled The Haunted. It didn’t ring a bell, but I decided to look into it anyway. I love finding obscure old movies anyway, but this one solved a decades-long mystery for me. I searched for The Haunted on YouTube and found it. Then I scanned through the footage for tape inside a refrigerator. There it was!
So I sat back and watched the entire movie. I found most of the moments I remembered to still be there pretty much as my mind had recorded them, though the cussing I recalled hearing didn’t actually happen. Instead, that was just a story told by a character in the movie. But the movie affected me so much that I remembered it in a more upsetting way than it was actually presented on screen. I found that actually happened a lot. The other things I remembered were there, but they weren’t quite as upsetting as I thought they were. The tape still gets me though.
So, my new viewing of The Haunted didn’t scare me as much as it did when I was a kid. That’s natural. That’s just the effect of nostalgia. But I do think The Haunted is a well-made movie. Especially a made-for-television movie from the 1990s.
Is The Haunted Still Scary?
The Haunted stars Jeffrey DeMunn (Dale in The Walking Dead) and Sally Kirkland (Fatal Games) as Jack and Janet Smurl. After I rediscovered the movie, I read the book that it’s based on. The movie mostly follows the story of the book, though some things are left out or condensed quite a lot. The book is better, but that’s usually the case. The movie is still pretty good though.
Unlike the book, the film is told mostly from Janet Smurl’s point of view. The first thirty minutes feels like a typical haunted house movie where the one person who experiences things is thought by her family to be imagining everything because of stress or whatever. Thankfully that nonsense ends and the rest of the movie is about Jack and Janet working together to try to solve their supernatural problems.
Many of the supernatural moments hold up well in my opinion. There’s a dark, shadowy presence seen in the house that is still pretty spooky. The noises and whispers are effective. And the overall tension is built nicely. A few moments don’t work as well anymore, and those mostly involve objects moving on screen and the scene where Janet is “thrown” into her bedroom wall. That looks pretty cheesy. But I’m still surprised that Jack’s assault by a demonic female force aired on television in 1991. It’s not explicit, but it’s pretty bold for TV. But it was shown on Fox, and they were known for pushing boundaries at the time.
So, The Haunted might still be slightly scary for new viewers, but only if you can let yourself be taken in by the story. I doubt modern audiences discovering the movie for the first time will have the same reaction I did 34 years ago, but it was effective on an impressionable kid in 1991. The movie ends on a dark note as the haunting continues past the film’s finale. There’s a text epilogue that says the Smurls were finally able to get rid of the haunting in 1989, but it’s still an eerie way to end a haunted house movie. To answer the question about whether or not The Haunted is still scary, I say not really, but it is quaintly eerie.
Oh, and if you’re wondering how involved Ed and Lorraine Warren are in the movie, they’re only in a few scenes. They show up to the Smurls’ house once, and Jack talks to Ed on the phone, but that’s about it. Part of the theme of the movie is how Jack and Janet are basically left to fend for themselves because nobody wants to help them, so minimizing the Warrens’ presence makes sense.
If you want to check out The Haunted, you can find it on YouTube.
