Alan Bono was forty years old. He ran a kennel in Brookfield, Connecticut, and on February 16, 1981, he bought lunch for a group of his employees and drank through the afternoon. By evening he was dead, stabbed in the chest and stomach by a twenty-two-year-old man named Arne Cheyenne Johnson, who told police afterward that he didn’t remember doing it. Johnson served five years. The film renames him: a character called Bruno Sauls dies in his place, in a fictional building, killed by a man whose surname has been quietly changed. I understand why studios do this — legal insulation, mostly — but I want to start here anyway, because everything that follows in Conjuring 3 hidden details territory depends on you forgetting that a real man with a real name bled to death on a real floor while his friends tried to hold his landlord back.The film is a Michael Chaves picture, written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick from a story he co-developed with James Wan, and it’s the first entry in the Conjuring series to leave the haunted-house structure entirely. Ed and Lorraine Warren, again played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, spend the runtime chasing a satanic curse across Connecticut and Massachusetts instead of investigating a single location. That structural choice is the most interesting thing about the movie, and it’s also the mechanism the screenplay uses to bury a genuinely troubling true story under a plot that never happened.Here’s my position, stated early because I don’t believe in saving it: the invented conspiracy is a story about a disputed death that resolves its own ambiguity by manufacturing a villain, and it does this at the exact moment the real case was becoming more contested. I’ll get to the Conjuring 3 hidden details — there are good ones, and Chaves clearly loves this genre enough to bury them with care. But I want the true story on the table first, because the film buries that too.
What the Trial Actually Decided
The film’s title comes from a real legal argument, and the film gets the headline right: Johnson’s lawyer, Martin Minnella, did attempt to argue that his client was not criminally responsible because he had been possessed by a demon at the time of the killing. That argument never reached a jury. Judge Robert Callahan ruled before the trial that a possession defense was inadmissible — “irrelevant and unscientific,” in his words — because there was no way to enter it as evidence in a court of law. The defense pivoted to self-defense instead. The jury deliberated for fifteen hours over three days and convicted Johnson of first-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to ten to twenty years and served five.That’s the entire legal story, and it’s a smaller, stranger, more procedural story than the one the marketing sold. There is no courtroom scene in the film where a judge weighs supernatural testimony, because that scene never happened in reality either — Callahan shut the door on it before opening statements. The film compresses the trial into a montage and moves on quickly, which is a reasonable structural choice for a two-hour movie. What’s less reasonable is what the screenplay builds in its place: ninety minutes of the Warrens chasing physical proof of the exact defense a real judge had already ruled could never be tested in court. The film relitigates the case off the record, with a fictional villain standing in for the reasonable doubt a jury was never allowed to hear.The real defense prep was stranger than anything in this list of Conjuring 3 hidden details, and none of it made the final cut. Johnson’s lawyer, Martin Minnella, traveled to England to consult with lawyers who had argued a possession defense in two earlier UK cases — including the acquittal of Michael Taylor, a case the film actually references by name when the Warrens weigh whether Johnson’s defense has any precedent. Minnella threatened to subpoena the priests who’d overseen David Glatzel’s exorcism if they didn’t cooperate. And within days of the killing, a “media blitz” had already formed around the case, fueled in part by the Warrens themselves, whose agents were promising lecture tours, a book deal, and a movie before Johnson had even gone to trial. The commercial machine that eventually produced this film was, in other words, already running in 1981 — which makes the film’s decision to invent a cleaner villain feel less like dramatic necessity and more like a continuation of the same instinct.
Kastner, Isla, and a Curse That Exists Nowhere Outside the Screenplay
Everything in this section is invented. I want to be unambiguous about that before I describe it, because the film’s marketing leaned hard on “based on a true story,” and the further you get from the Glatzel exorcism, the more fictional everything on screen becomes.In the film, Ed and Lorraine trace David Glatzel’s possession to a cursed totem, planted under the family’s home by an occultist. That leads them to Father Kastner, a former priest played by John Noble, who studied a satanic cult decades earlier and now keeps his own room of confiscated artifacts. Kastner eventually reveals that the occultist is his secret daughter, Isla, conceived in violation of his vow of celibacy and raised in hiding. Isla grew up around his research into the occult and became genuinely devoted to it. She’s connected to a second, invented case — the deaths of Katie Lincoln and Jessica Strong in Danvers, Massachusetts, tied together by a matching totem and a shared stab-wound count. The climax has Isla luring Lorraine into underground tunnels beneath Kastner’s house, killing her own father, and cursing both Ed and Arne before being killed by the demon she summoned.Kastner, Isla, the Danvers case, the Stregherian curse, the tunnel, the altar — every piece of that mechanism is fiction, built for the screenplay. None of it appears in the trial record, in the Brittle book the film credits as source material, or in any account given by anyone actually involved in the Glatzel or Johnson families. The screenplay needed a mechanism — a villain who could be defeated, a physical object that could be destroyed to end the curse — because the actual historical record doesn’t offer one. Reality just offers a dead man, a disputed possession claim, and a family that has spent over forty years arguing with each other about what actually happened in that house. A demonologist conspiracy with a secret witch daughter is a satisfying three-act structure. It is a considerable distance from what the title cards implied when they said this was based on real events.
The Conjuring 3 Hidden Details Worth Actually Noticing
Chaves has said in interviews that he built the film’s opening as a series of “shameless nods” to the horror movies that shaped him, and once you know to look, the film is dense with them — most confirmed directly by the crew, not speculated by fans. These are the Conjuring 3 hidden details that hold up under scrutiny.Father Gordon’s arrival at the Glatzel house is staged as a near shot-for-shot echo of Father Merrin’s arrival in
The Exorcist — the cab pulling up, the figure under a streetlight, the camera holding on the house before he walks to the door. Inside, David’s possession borrows the visual grammar directly, from the light blue pajamas that echo Regan’s nightgown to the same spider-limbed contortion during the exorcism itself. The mechanism that saves David — Arne begging the demon to take him instead — is a direct structural echo of Father Karras offering his own body in Friedkin’s film.That’s not the only classic the opening steals from. Before Father Gordon reaches the door, he glances up at a lit window and sees a figure — which is Arne, not a threat, but the shot is staged to recall Marion Crane spotting “Mother” in the window of the Bates house. Minutes later, David hides in the bathtub as blood sprays from the showerhead above him, a direct visual quote of Hitchcock’s shower scene. Two Hitchcock-and-Friedkin nods in one sequence is not restraint. It’s a director telling you exactly which movies raised him.Smaller and easier to miss: while Ed recovers in the hospital after his heart attack, flowers arrive from well-wishers, and among the cards is one from the Perron family, the household Ed and Lorraine helped in the original 2013
Conjuring. It’s a blink-and-miss detail, confirming that this version of the Warrens’ career continues chronologically from film to film rather than resetting with each entry.Valak shows up twice. Ed’s painting of the demon from
The Conjuring 2 hangs in the Warrens’ artifact room, exactly where you’d expect it. Earlier in the film, in the Glatzels’ bedroom, a small nun-shaped figurine sits on a shelf behind Debbie and Arne — a quiet visual callback planted well before the character has any narrative reason to appear.There’s also a waterbed that owes something to Freddy Krueger. When the Glatzel family moves into their new home, David discovers a waterbed left behind by the previous tenants, and a hand bursts out of it toward him — a direct lift from
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, where Freddy attacks a character through the same setup. The connection has a production credit behind it, not just a resemblance: the film’s assistant director, Jeffrey Wetzel, worked on
The Dream Master as well.The film also borrows a line from itself. In Kastner’s basement, surrounded by his own collection of dangerous relics, he tells Lorraine he’s thought about burning everything but keeps it locked away instead: “I felt it was safer to keep them locked. I like taking guns off the streets.” It’s nearly identical to a line Ed delivers in the very first
Conjuring, when a reporter asks why the Warrens don’t destroy the objects in their own collection: “That would only destroy the vessel. Sometimes it’s better to keep the genie in the bottle. It’s kind of like keeping guns off the street.” The parallel makes Kastner one of the more interesting Conjuring 3 hidden details, precisely because it’s structural rather than decorative: he’s written as a dark mirror of Ed, given the same philosophy and the same room, except his version of the room produced a daughter who became exactly the kind of threat he claimed to be containing.The Disciples of Ram cult, referenced throughout the film as the group Kastner researched decades earlier, is the same cult established in the
Annabelle films — the one responsible for Annabelle Higgins’ transformation into the doll’s original host. ScreenRant’s own reporting frames this as a first for the mainline Conjuring trilogy specifically, since the mythology had previously stayed contained to the Annabelle spinoffs. It’s a small piece of continuity, but it’s the kind of connective tissue that only shows up if someone on the writing team is keeping a very specific spreadsheet — which brings me to the last one.One of the more revealing Conjuring 3 hidden details never made it into the finished cut at all. During reshoots, Michael Chaves removed an entire demonic antagonist, played by actor Davis Osbourne, who had originally been written to work alongside the Occultist and was meant to seed a spin-off. Chaves has said the character simply “wasn’t quite connecting,” so Osbourne was quietly repurposed into a background role as a hospital patient instead, and John Noble’s part as Kastner was expanded during the same reshoots to fill the gap. It’s a small, very ordinary piece of studio filmmaking — a subplot cut for pacing — but it’s worth sitting with for a second, because it’s the same instinct at a smaller scale: when a thread doesn’t serve the story the studio wants to tell, it gets quietly written out, whether that thread is a spin-off character or a family’s forty-year argument about what happened to their son.Ed and Lorraine visit Palmeri Funeral Home while investigating the Danvers deaths. “Palmeri” isn’t a new name to the universe: the Form family lived at the Palmeri Apartments in the first
Annabelle, and a character named Bob Palmeri appears in
Annabelle Comes Home. And in the film’s final minutes, Chaves stages the climax as a direct visual quote of
The Shining — Ed chasing Lorraine through underground tunnels with a sledgehammer instead of an axe, walking with a deliberate limp that recalls Jack Torrance’s own damaged gait through the Overlook’s hallways. It’s the most unsubtle homage in the film, and also, structurally, the most effective one — the tunnels give the chase the same claustrophobic geometry the Overlook’s corridors gave Kubrick.
Where the Craft Actually Works
The filmmaking itself is frequently sharper than the script it’s serving. Watching it, the Danvers material reads cooler and flatter than the warmer Brookfield scenes to me — Michael Burgess’s photography doing quiet work most viewers won’t clock consciously, letting you feel which timeline you’re in before a line of dialogue confirms it. Joseph Bishara, scoring his fourth entry in this universe, pulls back rather than swells under Kastner’s basement scenes, which reads as the more unsettling choice of the two available to him. Farmiga and Wilson remain the reason these films work as well as they do. There’s a scene late in the film where Ed, mid-possession, is talked back from the edge by Lorraine reminding him of their marriage, and whatever you think of the plot mechanics that got them there, both actors sell the moment as something earned. The editing, credited to Peter Gvozdas and Christian Wagner, tells its own version of this argument if you watch where the runtime actually goes: the real trial compresses into a montage that barely clears two minutes, while the invented conspiracy — Kastner’s confession, the tunnel chase, the altar — gets nearly twenty. That’s not automatically a filmmaking failure; genre cinema is allowed to spend its runtime on genre payoffs. But the editing choices function as their own quiet argument about which version of this story earns the audience’s attention, and the real one loses by a wide margin.Critics mostly noticed the same imbalance, even without digging into the trial record. David Rooney at
The Hollywood Reporter wrote that “the grounding in dark spirituality that made the previous entries focused on the Warrens so compelling gets diluted” here, and the film currently sits at
56% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 53 on Metacritic — the weakest reception of the mainline trilogy by a wide margin, against a $39 million budget that still returned $206.4 million worldwide. Audiences liked it more than critics did, but even the CinemaScore dropped from the first two films’ A- down to a B+. Something in the shift away from a haunted house and toward a courtroom-adjacent conspiracy didn’t sit right with people, even when they couldn’t say exactly why.
What Carl Glatzel Says Actually Happened
Here’s the part the marketing never mentions — the part no roundup of Conjuring 3 hidden details usually includes — and the part that turns my irritation with the film’s invented conspiracy into something closer to actual anger.David Glatzel’s older brother, Carl Glatzel Jr., sued the publishers of
The Devil in Connecticut — the Gerald Brittle book the film credits as inspiration — in 2007, when it was reissued. His claim was direct: the possession story was, in his account, constructed by Ed and Lorraine Warren to exploit his family and his brother’s documented mental illness, and the book cast him specifically as a villain because he refused to support the supernatural version of events. He said the Warrens told the family the story would make them wealthy and would help get Johnson released from prison. Their father, Carl Glatzel Sr., went on record denying he ever told Brittle that his son had been possessed.In 2023, Netflix’s documentary
The Devil on Trial revisited the case with new interviews, including one in which Carl Jr. raised a specific, mundane, and far less cinematic possibility: that his brother’s symptoms — the growling, the disorientation, the altered speech — lined up with side effects of Sominex, an over-the-counter sleep aid, rather than anything supernatural. I’m not asserting that as settled fact. Nobody involved has proven it either way, and that’s precisely the point. The real case is genuinely unresolved, argued over for four decades by the people who lived through it, with money, reputation, and a family’s account of a dead teenager’s mental health all tangled together in ways that resist a clean answer.The film doesn’t sit in that discomfort for even a scene. It replaces an unresolved family dispute with a demonologist’s secret daughter and a curse that gets physically destroyed in the final act, because a lit altar makes for a better ending than “we still don’t actually know.” That’s a screenwriting choice I understand. It’s also, I think, a small dishonesty stacked on top of a larger one — the film gets to use Alan Bono’s death as the engine for a supernatural procedural while never once acknowledging that the people who survived this story are still fighting about whether any of it was real.This is a habit that runs across the whole franchise. I’ve spent enough time going through the
Warrens’ actual case files to recognize the pattern: a family dispute or an ambiguous death gets simplified into a clean supernatural narrative, sold with the confidence of documented fact, and the messier human version quietly drops out of the marketing. The
real Annabelle doll case followed the same shape long before Arne Johnson’s trial did, and it’s worth remembering that every one of these stories started as something far more ordinary and far sadder than the finished film admits. A franchise built on turning disputed grief into franchise mythology doesn’t have much incentive to let a case stay disputed.
Ethan’s Score: 5.5 / 10
Ethan’s Score: 5.5 / 10 — The film builds a scare competently, and it knows how to shoot two actors who’ve spent three movies proving they can carry a franchise on chemistry alone. Sitting inside an uncomfortable, disputed piece of American legal history is a different skill, and the script keeps sanding that discomfort down into a monster movie with a tidy ending instead. Somewhere underneath the totems and the tunnels — underneath every one of the Conjuring 3 hidden details catalogued above — is a genuinely disturbing story about a family that never agreed on what happened to them. The film had that story in its hands and chose the easier one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It based on a true story?
It’s based on the 1981 trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, the first American case where a defendant’s lawyer argued demonic possession as a legal defense. The judge ruled the defense inadmissible before trial, and Johnson was convicted of manslaughter. Most of the plot beyond that trial — the occultist, the curse, the secret daughter — is invented.
Conjuring 3 hidden details: How many hidden details are in The Conjuring 3?
This roundup covers eight confirmed Conjuring 3 hidden details, ranging from the Exorcist and Psycho homages in the opening sequence to the demonic subplot Michael Chaves cut entirely during reshoots. Every detail here is confirmed through cast, crew, or director interviews rather than fan speculation.
What are the best Conjuring 3 hidden details to look for?
The strongest confirmed details include the Exorcist and Psycho homages in the opening sequence, the Valak nun figurine in the Glatzel bedroom, the Nightmare on Elm Street 4 waterbed reference, and Father Kastner’s line echoing Ed Warren’s dialogue from the first Conjuring almost word for word.
Conjuring 3 hidden details: Who is Father Kastner based on in real life?
No one. Father Kastner, his artifact room, and his daughter Isla are entirely fictional characters created for the film. There is no equivalent figure in the trial record, the Brittle book, or any account given by the Glatzel or Johnson families.
Conjuring 3 hidden details: What happened to the real victim, Alan Bono?
Alan Bono was a forty-year-old kennel owner and Arne Johnson’s landlord. He died after being stabbed during a confrontation in Brookfield, Connecticut, in February 1981. The film renames him Bruno Sauls and changes the setting of his death.
Conjuring 3 hidden details: Did Arne Johnson go to prison?
Yes. He was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in November 1981 and sentenced to ten to twenty years. He served five years before being released.
Conjuring 3 hidden details: Does David Glatzel’s family agree the possession was real?
No. His brother, Carl Glatzel Jr., sued the book’s publishers in 2007, alleging the Warrens fabricated the possession narrative for profit. Their father also denied ever confirming his son was possessed. Arne Johnson and Debbie Glatzel have maintained the account is accurate.
Conjuring 3 hidden details: Is the Disciples of Ram cult connected to the Annabelle movies?
Yes. The cult Father Kastner investigated decades earlier is the same Disciples of Ram cult from the Annabelle films, responsible for turning Annabelle Higgins into the doll’s original host. It’s the first time that mythology has been folded into a mainline Conjuring film rather than an Annabelle spinoff.
