A Case That Wouldn’t Let Go
The Devil on Trial chronicles the harrowing 1981 Arne Cheyenne Johnson murder case, the only U.S. court case to use “demonic possession” as a legal defense. The film examines the haunting intersection of faith, fear, and justice through the lenses of the Glatzel family, paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, and various legal teams involved in the case.
The film’s subject, however, was not only the supernatural. It was also his own acute and emotional exhaustion, moral ambiguity, and the thin line between documentation and exploitation. The case was a subject of endless ethical questions, borderline, and, much like its subject, the case was an exercise in endurance, and gotten as much the form of the film for the endless ethical and borderline questions in documentation.
When Reality Weighed Heavy on Production
How trauma and belief in a sensational paranormal space and the absence of documentation. He didn’t want to make another sensational ghost film.
The older documentary materials from the 1980s consisted of Polaroids, reel-to-reel tapes, and snippets of interviews. These items were almost forgotten. Restoring them was challenging. There was the extensive work of visual and audio technicians, which were painstakingly completed and edited without altering the original, in order to avoid restoring the lost tapes that were made to be forgotten. For a documentary that barely exceeds an hour, the efforts to restore the audio and video were immense.
The documentary materials were edited in a way that preserved the unencumbered flow of a documentary. This made the materials especially impactful for the audiences. They were primarily designed to invoke and capture the raw emotions of a documentary.
The Families, Faith and Forgotten Bonds
The Glatzel family became the heart of the story, and their involvement made the filming both powerful and painful. David, Alan, and Carl Glatzel appear as themselves, revisiting a period that tore their family apart. For some, it was a chance to be heard; for others, it was an opportunity to continue revisiting aching memories that never rested.
Carl, the eldest brother, was the most skeptical about the possession narrative, while David and Alan staunchly maintained that something evil had overtaken them. Director Chris Holt spent months conducting individual interviews, gathering what, at times, appeared as contradictory and conflicting accounts.
The crew was in the front row as trauma was unfolding, requiring them to manage the most delicate emotional landscapes. Members of the crew shared that after particular interviews, everyone would take a calm, solitary break outside, the emotional load simply too great to bear.
The documentary pivots on the central axis of belief. The filmmakers, too, were tormented by that fundamental question. How much of the family story could be transformed into content for the audience? How could a balance be achieved between the family’s religious convictions and the filmmakers’ journalistic objectivity? Such questions were central and practical, rather than abstract and creative, and spanned every decision made on set.
Holt’s team had made a practical decision not to assign “right” or “wrong” labels to anyone. Instead, they chose to show contradictions, as they were, messy, painful, and unresolved. The crew later described this as, “walking a tightrope between empathy and evidence.”
To shape the hours of raw footage into a coherent narrative, the editing process involved spinning the truth, which became another battlefield. One editor described “assembling the possession tapes into a watchable sequence” as “one of the most disturbing experiences of my career.”
During post-production, editors Joby Gee and Sebastian Smith had to build factual tension between the varying segments, which became a complicated endeavor. The raw recordings of David’s alleged possession was emotionally intense, and, as a result, some team members were reported to be unable to listen to the tapes for long periods.
Sometimes, the editing suite would descend into complete silence for prolonged periods of time, with the only sound being a tape from the past playing monotonously for hours. One of the team members had stated, “We were telling a horror story, but after midnight, it felt like we were living one.”
The sound team had perfectionist tendencies, but they were the ones responsible for the ‘flaws’ in the recordings, such as muffled echoes or static. They realized that an over-produced polished audio would be an inaccurate representation of reality.
Legal Labyrinths and Delays
The story had its own complex legal issues. The collection of archival footage and testimonies, along with some legal documents, had to be obtained in legally sanctioned ways. The final cuts were reviewed by the lawyers repeatedly, ensuring that living individuals would not be legally able to file defamation lawsuits.
The legal issues imposed on the story were responsible for the delays intended for the film’s release, and for the attempts to re-edit the film’s narrative. The same legal system that once refused to recognize ‘demonic possession’ as a legal defense now dictated what parts of that story could be shown to the public.
When On-Screen Horror Mirrored Off-Screen Strain
Screening the film presents a glimpse of a young boy tortured by a demonic entity, a family attempting to discover the mystery, and a man being tried for a crime he claims he didn’t commit. The similarities were equally striking off-screen; filmmakers tormented by dilemmas of conscience, families divided by truth and disbelief, and all seeking a misplaced closure.
One of the most impactful moments in the documentary is when David explained he felt a “presence” leave him and enter Arne, a transfer of a demonic entity. Rumor has it, during playback of that recording, a crew member fainted and most people on the set of the movie felt the eeriness.
The fragmentary style of shooting the reenactment sequences was also in service of the director’s objective of having viewers experience the uncertainty that defined the real case. Visually, the film was a reflection of the emotional chaos that it sought to depict.
A Narrative That Would Not End
When it finally premiered, reactions were divided; some viewed it as an honest reckoning with belief and fear, while others considered it as taking too weak a position. Even among the crew, there was a palpable sense that The Devil on Trial was never intended to provide closure.
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