Here are the facts: on 16 February 1981, 19-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson, his sister Wanda, his fiancee Debbie Glatzel, her cousin Mary and Debbie’s employer/landlord Alan Bono all went to lunch at a bar in Brookfield, Connecticut. Over the course of the afternoon, Bono drank to the point of inebriated belligerence, and soon began to roughly handle young Mary. A visibly enraged Johnson intervened, tussled with Bono, drew a five-inch pocketknife and stabbed the man repeatedly. Bono succumbed to his wounds a few hours later, and Johnson was apprehended by the police two miles away from the scene of the crime.
That November, his trial became a media sensation when his legal representation pleaded innocence by cause of demonic possession, explaining that Johnson took on an unholy passenger while participating in an exorcism for Debbie’s little brother David with the noted paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren the previous fall. The judge swiftly ruled against the claim as unverifiable, and Johnson was convicted of manslaughter with a 10- to 20-year sentence, of which he served five.
The unanswerable question of whether Johnson genuinely believed in his outlandish defense or held fast to it for the sake of a not-guilty verdict still hangs over the case, and so with his new documentary The Devil on Trial, director Christopher Holt knew better than to even try. Rather than sussing out an elusive thread of truth in a tangle of faith and subjectivity, he instead placed focus on the Glatzels, a family forever marred by tragedy they still struggle to fully understand. In recounting the lead-up to and fallout from that fateful day, David, his brothers Carl and Alan, and the freed Johnson remember the mystical mystery primarily as a trauma that altered the course of all their lives, its reverberating effects all too real.
“I’m from a sort of Catholic background, but I’m also a skeptic,” Holt tells the Guardian from his home in London. “I need to poke my fingers into holes. We never set out to prove that David and the Warrens were telling the truth, or that they weren’t. We wanted each brother to lay out their facts as it runs up to the core case.”
Holt was initially reluctant to explore the topic, feeling that he’d gotten his fill from a supernaturally-tinged gig earlier in his career. But he reconsidered his position once he saw a path that could lead away from the sensationalism peddled by the likes of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, just one fright-forward adaptation of Johnson and the Glatzels’ sad tale. “It would’ve been very easy to follow the success of horror films, to lean into their tropes,” says Holt. “There are so many moments in the doc that could’ve lent themselves to that, but we wanted to pull back from that.”
He uses dramatizations to fill the gaps between the interviews and decades-old home movies, but mostly to give a fuller impression of the Glatzels’ domestic life as they sought help for David’s afflictions, including random bruises, haunting visions and the occasional bout of speaking in tongues. “Alarm bells always go off when you’re offered a job on a supernatural story,” says Holt. “You’ve got to be wary of people who really want you to show that something inexplicable happened. There’s a million ways to edit this program, and more than one would nudge people toward believing this all happened, and we didn’t want to do that … It’s the story of a family going through real crisis. Then you also have a true crime element, the murder and trial. These elements captivate people. They want to know how this could’ve happened, and been allowed to happen.”
The sequence of events itself doesn’t require that much analysis: Johnson committed the crime, his lawyers attempted a gambit that no one had dared try since the Salem witch hysteria did away with the use of “spectral evidence”, and it failed. Holt trained his lens on the personal element of the exorcism, the desperation of the Glatzel clan to gain some clarity on the causes of David’s baffling behavior. (“It’s a real person’s story,” says Holt, as he often reminded himself during production.) Though the film delves into the complicated logistics of exorcism as a service offered by the Catholic church (the Warrens, facing a thicket of red tape as they lobbied for permissions from Rome, ultimately settled for a lesser procedure called a “deliverance”, under the auspices of the Bridgeport diocese), it all goes back to a group of brothers trying to take care of one another.
“I didn’t change my ideas about the devil or God during this process,” says Holt. “I don’t believe in demons running around. But it’s fascinating to peer behind the curtain of a well-known story to find the truth in the human beings. These people really believed something happened, and you’ve got to remember that. You’ve got to guard and protected them, in a certain way, because they’ve trusted you. This hurt them deeply, really damaged the family, you’ve got to stay aware of that.”
Holt saw little difference between his latest documentary and some of his earlier projects about science, both extensions of the innate mortal tendency to seek out explanations for the seemingly miraculous. Superstition is a perfectly rational phenomenon for how it fills in the gaps between what we observe and what we know, and at the Glatzel house, it became a last resort for parents and siblings at a loss in their efforts to help an ailing boy. Holt is not immune, either; while shooting, his cinematographer noticed one shot in which a candle appeared to spontaneously light itself in the background. Following some brief astonishment, they realized that a small circular hole in the blinds they’d put over a window let in a beam of light that landed right on the candle’s wick, caught by the camera as an out-of-focus illusion of flame. “Nothing creepy there,” he laughs. “Just our movement around the sun.”
And yet faith nonetheless played a significant role in Holt’s film-making, as he made the choice to take the Glatzels’ words at face value. During the extensive interview sessions, he didn’t feel that he could get inside Johnson’s head, concluding of the man’s inner conflict that “how he deals with it every day is between him and his god.” But in David, Alan and Carl, he found a plight he could subscribe to as authentic. Just as the girls in Salem acted out of a combination of comprehensible factors – boredom, repression, the child’s natural drive to test boundaries – the Glatzel case reflects a response to the psychology and sociology of their environment. Holt has accepted that the full scope of this sad episode may never come into clear view, but he maintains that anyone willing to look close enough can see sincere anguish.
“I never believed that when Alan and David were sitting in front of me, that they were lying to me,” says Holt. “I’ve been lied to on numerous occasions, and as an interviewer, you get a sense for people like that. And I was sitting with these guys for nine hours, grueling days, and you can see if a story starts to change. It never did, with David and Alan. I believe that they believe this happened. And I think the ending of our film explains it all. I don’t think it was devils or demons, but I do think something went on in that house.”
The Devil on Trial is now available on Netflix
