The Devil on Trial
Review of Netflix’s new documentary
Even if the words Netflix and documentary next to each other bring to mind slapdash pieces with surface-level examinations of facts, and/or gloss over the more mundane ones, when the introduction reads: ‘Using reenactment and home videos, this dark documentary investigates the apparent possession of a young boy — and the brutal murder that followed,’ it piqued my interest.
Not least because such claims are rarely, if ever, invoked in courts, and in the US legal system there has been just one case to claim ‘demonic possession’ as a murder defence — the 1981 trial of a 19-year-old murder suspect Arne Cheyenne Johnson, often referred to as the ‘Devil Made Me Do It’ trial, which the documentary is based on.
While the tragedy and the ensuing trial were fictionalised and sensationalised numerous times, according to the director Christopher Holt —The Devil on Trial is the first attempt to examine the real events recounted by those who lived them.
With that in mind, and with opening lines as good as, “My name is David Glatzel. When I was 11, I was possessed by the devil,” expectations are rightfully high. Maybe not so fast.
The first problem is the audience does not get a sense of the kind of life David or his siblings have been leading since the tragedy or are leading now. Throughout the documentary, David’s backdrop does not change, his brother Alan puts in an occasional appearance mostly to corroborate his story, while Arne nods along as they recall traumatic memories, including audio recordings and Polaroid stills. It isn’t until much later in the piece that David’s brother Carl voices a very different take on the events.
The overall impression is that Holt tried very hard not to fall into the overused tropes paddled by the likes of the threeConjuringfilms and has instead opted for a more straightforward adaptation of a real family going through a real crisis and employed dramatisations to fill the gaps between the interviews and decades-old home movies to give a fuller impression of the Glatzels’ domestic life.
Whether or not the Glatzels were or are ‘an ordinary all-American’ family is wisely left to the viewer to decide, as is the still-unanswerable question of whether Arne truly believed in his unusual defence, or whether he held to it for the sake of a non-guilty verdict.
Clearly, Holt knows well how elusive the thread of truth could be, never more so than when caught between personal experiences, memories, and faith. To that end, the documentary managed to convey this message:
Whatever view on supernatural events one adopts, the trauma suffered by the Glatzels family was and remains real.
It is what, in my view, makes the documentary worth watching, despite some misgivings.
The facts themselves are rather uncomplicated: In February 1981, 19-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson, his sister Wanda, Arne’s fiancée Debbie Glatzel and 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 became very drunk and began to roughly handle young Mary. A visibly enraged Arne intervened, struggled with Bono, drew a five-inch pocketknife and stabbed the man repeatedly. Bono succumbed to his wounds a few hours later, and Arne was apprehended by the police two miles away from the scene of the crime.
That November, his trial became a media sensation when his lawyer pleaded innocence by cause of demonic possession, explaining that Arne took on an unholy passenger while participating in an exorcism for Debbie’s little brother David with the well-known paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren the previous fall. The judge ruled against the claim as unverifiable, and Johnson was convicted of manslaughter with a 10 to 20 year sentence, of which he served five.
What caused the events that led to the exorcism and the involvement of the Warrens’, and what their involvement meant for the family against the larger sociological and psychological milieu of their lives, is portrayed well enough to prompt some serious questions and discussions. Perhaps even about the meanings of the words we use to name and describe acts such as murder.
Does the term ‘possession’ indicate that part of what makes us human (say ‘soul’) must be taken by some dark (say ‘evil’) force(s) for us to kill? Does the term ‘exorcism’, name or describe centuries-old rituals used to separate ‘good’ from ‘evil,’ and what do those terms mean to us today?
Those are just some questions that occurred to me after I finished watching the film. Would be great to hear some of yours too! :)
