While The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It's "true story" may be extremely loose at best, it does pull elements of another very real phenomena that swept through pop culture in the 1980s. The Satanic Panic, as it came to be known, described a specific type of moral outrage that was stoked by everything from fundamentalist groups to concerned parents well into the early '90s. In fact, it even persists in some ways today, though the form it takes has changed overtime.

The following contains spoilers for The Conjuring: The Devil made Me Do It, so please proceed with caution.

When things really begin to diverge from the source material in The Conjuring 3, we learn that Warrens have identified a curse placed on the Glatzel family, left by a Satan-worshiping witch. Said curse invited the demon into their home that attacked Julian and then wound up possessing Arne, which lead him to commit the murder the story revolves around. Naturally, none of this happened in the real case--there was no heretical totem hidden in the house's crawlspace, no string of related ritual murders, and of course, no villainous witch for Lorraine to fight with psychic powers.