The latest (and seemingly final) trailer for The Conjuring: Last Rites directly addresses a subject that the previous previews only hinted at: the real-life story of the Smurl family haunting that inspired the upcoming film.
In that trailer, we see footage of the Smurls speaking with the Warrens when the couple went to visit the family in 1986. Said footage is highlighted by Jack Smurl saying “I thought that these type things only happen in movies,” a line that got a lot of media play as the story of the Smurls drew national attention throughout the ‘80s. In fact, the Smurl family story would later inspire a 1986 novel titled “The Haunted: One Family’s Nightmare,” a 1991 made-for-TV movie called The Haunted, and, of course, what will reportedly be the final “phase one” Conjuring film (whatever that may mean).
And what a finale it should be. While the Smurl story is hardly the Warren’s most famous case, all that talk in the trailer about this being an evil like they’ve never faced before isn’t entirely inaccurate (at least within the context of the Warrens and this series’ numerous exaggerations). The real-life Smurl case was downright bizarre.
The Smurls moved into the house on Chase Street in West Pittston, Pennsylvania in 1973. For quite some time, everything in the home was seemingly normal. Soon, though, odd things began to occur. Furniture shifted on its own, items in the house went missing, inexplicable smells permeated the air, unplugged devices would suddenly become activated…those kinds of things. The family seemingly thought little of all of that and began renovating their new home.
It wasn’t until around 1985 that things took a sudden turn for the worse. The Smurl children were soon injured by broken and falling objects, the family began to hear screams throughout the house, mysterious shadow-like shapes were regularly spotted moving around, and some of the family members said they were physically attacked by those spirits. Most disturbingly, the Smurls’ son (Jack) claims to have been assaulted by the decaying form of some kind of succubus in the family living room.
The severity and frequency of these events (the Smurls and their neighbors claimed that such incidents began to occur daily) eventually attracted the Warrens’ attention. Without getting too far into potential spoilers, the Warrens shared some disturbing theories about the house that formed the basis for many of the retellings of the family’s story that followed. The Smurl family was reportedly able to live in peace in the home following a series of exorcisms and religious interventions, and future residents of the home never reported any similar supernatural incidents. Mind you, people refused to live in the home for years. If mold harms your resale value, you can imagine how quickly abusive spirits will tank a Zillow listing.
Of course, it should be noted that the authenticity of the Smurl family case, like many Warren cases over the years, is the subject of great debate. The book about the Smurl family was heavily criticized for its suspicious and seemingly biased reporting, and scholars and independent investigators offered a series of plausible alternative explanations for the Smurls’ experiences. It was, for instance, discovered that Jack Smurl had water removed from his brain in the early ‘80s due to memory loss issues, which certainly feels like a notable detail that often went overlooked in more sensationalized adaptations of the story.
Still, the Smurl family case frightened a generation. The increasingly shocking details of the events and the ways the Warrens described the vengeful spirit at the heart of the matter as “one of the strongest they had ever encountered” ignited imaginations everywhere. So if you’ve made peace with the…questionable accounts of the Warrens so far, you should feel excited to see a fictionalized version of the Smurl family case play out when The Conjuring: Last Rites premieres in theaters on September 5.
