In 2013 an apparently simple, back-to-basics scary movie transformed horror cinema for the rest of the decade. Based on the allegedly true story of the Perron family haunting and subsequent investigation by ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren, The Conjuring has to-date spawned six sequels and prequels, making up a Conjuring ‘universe’ that has taken over a billion dollars around the world. The New York Times called The Conjuring ‘a fantastically effective haunted-house movie’ which, following his earlier film Insidious, established director James Wan as a force in horror cinema. In this Devil’s Advocates, horror scholar Kevin Wetmore examines what elements in the film are truly terrifying, how the filmmakers’ claims of being based on a true story hold up against the actual history of the haunting and the Warrens, and the relationship between The Conjuring and the many films in its universe. Along the way this book also considers how games, toys and dolls play an important role in the series, offers a critique of gender roles in the films, and asks the question, what is actually ‘conjured’ in The Conjuring? The delightful result is an in-depth, close reading of a film that uses standard horror tropes masterfully to create a truly scary film.

The true story that is the basis for The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It opening in theaters June 4, 2021. It began with the lust of demons and the corruption of a young boy named David Glatzel. It ended with a murder trial that made headlines across the country--the trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, accused of brutally knifing a friend to death. Johnson's defense startled the nation: not guilty, by reason of demonic possession. Here is the horrifying true story of what happened on terrible summer in the sleepy town of Brookfield, Connecticut. How the Glatzels, an average suburban family, came under a terrifying demonic attack that changed their lives. How their eleven-year-old son, David, suffered monstrous visitations by an entity he could only identify as "the Beast." How a close friend, Arne Cheyenne Johnson, became the tragic victim of forces beyond anyone's control...and how the Glatzels' ordeal has still not ended.

A witch is a practitioner of witchcraft. The most obvious characteristic of a witch was the ability to cast a spell which is a word used to signify the means employed to carry out a magical action. A spell could consist of a set of words, a formula or verse, or a ritual action, or any combination of these. Spells traditionally were cast by many methods and two methods are by the immolation or binding of a wax or clay image of a person to affect him or her magically and by gazing at mirrors, swords or other speculas for purposes of divination. The Witch of Endor who had conjured up a spirit is mentioned in this book, and also, the witch is mentioned in the book of Samuel. Other types of witchcraft that are included in this book are: Folk Magic, Voodoo, Hoodoo, Roots Working, Séance, and more. This book will entertain and mesmerize its readers.

"Appalachian folk magic and conjure are little known today, but forty or fifty years ago, just about every person you might ask in Appalachia either knew something about it themselves or knew someone who did it. These practices and 'superstitions' are at the core Appalachian culture. Who were the old conjurors and witches of Appalachia? What did they do, believe in, and dress land talk like? How can you learn the ways of conjuring for yourself? This book answers those questions and more"--

This is the first book to consider the general course and significance of the European witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries since H.R. Trevor-Roper's classic and pioneering study appeared some fifteen years ago. Drawing upon the advances in historical and social-science scholarship of the past decade and a half, Joseph Klaits integrates the recent appreciations of witchcraft in regional studies, the history of popular culture, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better illuminate the place of witch hunting in the context of social, political, economic and religious change. "In all, Klaits has done a good job. Avoiding the scandalous and sensational, he has maintained throughout, with sensitivity and economy, an awareness of the uniqueness of the theories and persecutions that have fascinated scholars now for two decades and are unlikely to lose their appeal in the foreseeable future." —American Historical Review "This is a commendable synthesis whose time has come. . . . fascinating . . . " —The Sixteenth Century Journal " . . . comprehensive and clearly written . . . An excellent book . . . " —Choice "Impeccable research and interpretation stand behind this scholarly but not stultifying account . . . " —Booklist "A good, solid, general treatment . . . " —Erik Midelfort "Servants of Satan is a well written, easy to read book, and the bibliography is a good source of secondary materials for further reading." —Journal of American Folklore

A fascinating, wide-ranging survey of the history of demon possession and exorcism through the ages. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the era of the Reformation, thousands of Europeans were thought to be possessed by demons. In response to their horrifying symptoms—violent convulsions, displays of preternatural strength, vomiting of foreign objects, displaying contempt for sacred objects, and others—exorcists were summoned to expel the evil spirits from victims’ bodies. This compelling book focuses on possession and exorcism in the Reformation period, but also reaches back to the fifteenth century and forward to our own times. Entire convents of nuns in French, Italian, and Spanish towns, thirty boys in an Amsterdam orphanage, a small group of young girls in Salem, Massachusetts—these are among the instances of demon possession in the United States and throughout Europe that Brian Levack closely examines, taking into account the diverse interpretations of generations of theologians, biblical scholars, pastors, physicians, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and historians. Challenging the commonly held belief that possession signals physical or mental illness, the author argues that demoniacs and exorcists—consciously or not—are following their various religious cultures, and their performances can only be understood in those contexts. “Riveting [and] readable . . . must-reading for students of history, psychology and religion.” —Publishers Weekly “Levak, a distinguished historian of early modern witchcraft, now sets exorcism in a long historical perspective, providing the most comprehensive and scholarly overview of the theme yet published.” —Peter Marshall, Times Literary Supplement

Why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? Why does the metaphor of ventriloquism, the art of 'seeming to speak where one is not', speak so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition? These are the kind of questions which impel Steven Connor's wide-ranging, restlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. He tracks his subject from its first recorded beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the fulminations of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination, the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, during the Enlightenment. He retrieves the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the nineteenth century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the 'vocalic uncanny' of technologies like telephone, radio, film, and internet. Learned but lucid, brimming with anecdote and insight, this is much more than an archaeology of one of the most regularly derided but tenaciously enduring of popular arts. It is also a series of virtuoso philosophical and psychological reflections on the problems and astonishments, the raptures and absurdities of the unhoused voice.