What happened to the Warrens after the events of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It? The latest entry in the Conjuring Universe followed a real-life court case involving Ed and Lorraine Warren in 1981. The Warrens still had many more cases throughout the '80s, and still managed to stir up controversy up until their deaths in the 21st century.
Ed and Lorraine Warren were a pair of paranormal investigators who operated mainly in New England starting in the 1950s and continuing until Ed's passing in 2006 and Lorraine's in 2019. Their various cases would sometimes make national news and inspired multiple books about their findings, the most infamous of which was the Amityville hauntings. In the 2010s, The Conjuring movies began telling fictionalized versions of their adventures to great success, even managing to create a whole cinematic universe of spin-offs.
The third film, The Devil Made Me Do It, is significant in that it portrayed an actual factual court case where Arne Cheyenne Johnson claimed he killed his landlord because he was possessed by demons at the time of the manslaughter. The Warrens were involved due to their investigation of the possession of Johnson's soon-to-be brother-in-law, whom the family also believed to have been possessed by demons. The court case became famous as the first in American history where the defendant plead not guilty due to demonic possession, and it further catapulted the Warrens into the spotlight. Through the '80s and '90s, they investigated even more cases, such as the Snedecker House case which later served as a loose inspiration for the film The Haunting in Connecticut. The Warrens also continued to publish books about their findings and host their museum of haunted artifacts they had collected over the years.
The elephant in the room when talking about the Warrens is, of course, the various controversies and pieces of skepticism involving their cases. In the years following the events of The Devil Made Me Do It, many respected investigative journalists have looked over the "evidence" the Warrens had of paranormal anomalies and demonic possessions and found that basically none of it actually proved anything. Some have gone so far as to call the Warrens frauds and con artists simply trying to make money off of people. It doesn't help that some of their cases have, in the years since, been proven to be shams. The Amityville hauntings were later admitted to have been made up by the family over a couple of bottles of wine, and the Snedecker case was full of conflicting and unprovable stories from the family as to what actually happened. Ray Garton, a horror author who was investigating the case, even once said of Lorraine Warren, "If she told me the sun would come up tomorrow morning, I'd get a second opinion."
Even if the Warrens did exaggerate their findings over the years, the Conjuring universe has certainly smoothed out their image for a whole new generation of ghost enthusiasts. Following up The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It will prove to be an interesting task for the filmmakers, as they will have to find a way to navigate both their most famous cases and growing controversies.