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A Connecticut man’s defense attorney once argued in court — unsuccessfully — that his client should be acquitted because he was possessed by a demon; that real 1981 trial is the backbone of one of the documentaries below. These ten films go past the jump scares to interview the actual families, investigators, and skeptics involved, and the real stories are frequently stranger, and sadder, than the fiction they inspired.
| Documentary | Best for | Format |
|---|---|---|
| My Amityville Horror (2012) | True crime newcomers who want one well-documented case | Feature documentary |
| Amityville: An Origin Story (2023) | Viewers who want the full case history before the haunting claims | 4-part docuseries |
| The Devil on Trial (2023) | True crime fans who want an actual courtroom case | Feature documentary |
| Ghost Adventures (2008–present) | Viewers who want ongoing, in-the-moment investigations | Long-running TV series |
| Beware the Slenderman (2016) | Viewers more interested in psychology than the paranormal itself | Feature documentary |
1. My Amityville Horror (2012)
Forty years after the Lutz family fled 112 Ocean Avenue, director Eric Walter tracked down Daniel Lutz — the eldest child, who was nine when the alleged haunting happened — for his first extended interview about that winter. The film is less concerned with proving ghosts are real than with the psychological wreckage left behind; Daniel's stepfather George Lutz is painted as a possible source of terror in his own right. The other Lutz siblings declined to participate, which only deepens the film's sense of a fractured, unresolved story.
2. Amityville: An Origin Story (2023)
This four-part MGM+ docuseries goes back further than any prior Amityville production, starting with Ronald DeFeo Jr.'s 1974 murder of six family members in the same house — a year before the Lutzes moved in and claimed it was haunted. Interviews with relatives, investigators, and people connected to the DeFeo case examine how a real mass murder curdled into a decades-long “true story” about demons, and how the Lutz family's hoax accusations followed them for the rest of their lives.
3. Ghost Adventures (2008–present)
Zak Bagans, Aaron Goodwin, and Billy Tolley lock themselves inside supposedly haunted locations overnight, running EVP sessions and thermal cameras in real time. It's the longest-running show of its kind on television, and while its style leans more “reality TV” than sober investigation, the show has documented dozens of real, well-known haunted locations — from the Bobby Mackey's Music World in Kentucky to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum — that predate the show's own mythology.
4. Beware the Slenderman (2016)
An HBO documentary from director Irene Taylor Brodsky about the 2014 Wisconsin case in which two 12-year-old girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, lured a classmate into the woods and stabbed her nearly to death — an act they said was meant to appease the internet-born fictional entity Slender Man. Shot over eighteen months with unusual access to both families, the film is less about the paranormal itself than about how a creepypasta character became, in the girls' minds, terrifyingly real.
5. Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021)
Joe Berlinger's Netflix docuseries reconstructs the 2013 disappearance and death of Elisa Lam at Los Angeles's notorious Cecil Hotel, a building with its own dark history of deaths and, according to some guests over the decades, a lingering sense of dread. The elevator surveillance footage of Lam's final known movements went viral and spawned wild theories online; the series works best as a portrait of internet-fueled conspiracy thinking, even as critics noted it leans into that same speculation more than some viewers would like.
6. The Devil on Trial (2023)
This Netflix film revisits the 1981 case of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, a Connecticut man who killed his landlord, Alan Bono, and whose defense attorney argued — for the first and only time in U.S. legal history — that Johnson should be acquitted because he was possessed by a demon at the time. The film combines home-video footage, reenactments, and interviews to walk through the events, including the earlier exorcism of Johnson's future brother-in-law David Glatzel that the Warrens had been called in to handle. Judge Robert Callahan rejected the possession defense outright, and Johnson was convicted of manslaughter.
7. The Haunting Of… (2019–present)
This Travel Channel series takes a different structural approach: celebrities spend a night in a location connected to a traumatic event from their own past, paired with a medium who claims to make contact with the dead. It's more sentimental than investigative, but it repeatedly returns to real, documented locations and real personal tragedies rather than manufactured lore.
8. A Haunting (2005–present)
Long-running Discovery/Travel Channel series that dramatizes reported real-life hauntings using reenactments interwoven with interviews of the actual families involved. Its episode on the Smurl family of West Pittston, Pennsylvania — whose decades-long ordeal was also investigated by Ed and Lorraine Warren — remains one of the more widely cited entries, since the Smurls spoke on camera about assaults they said were carried out by an entity in their home.
9. Amityville Horror: The Real Story documentaries (various)
Multiple retrospective specials — produced for cable networks and streaming platforms over the years — return to interview surviving Lutz family associates, original investigators, and researchers who spent years trying to confirm or debunk the 1975 case. Watched together with My Amityville Horror and An Origin Story, they show how the “true story” behind one of horror's most adapted stories kept shifting every time someone new was interviewed.
10. Zak Bagans: Deadly Possessions / Demon House
Zak Bagans's more personal documentary work, including Demon House (2018), follows his investigation of an Indiana property where a family claimed to be tormented by demonic entities before the house was ultimately demolished. It's a polarizing entry — heavy on Bagans's own showmanship — but it's built around a real family's claims and a real DCS case file referenced in local news coverage at the time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: Are any of these documentaries considered scientifically verified proof of hauntings?
No. None of these films offer scientific proof of ghosts or demonic activity. They document real people's claims, real historical events, and real investigations — but the paranormal elements remain unproven and are often contested by skeptics interviewed within the films themselves.
Q2: Which of these is the best starting point if I'm new to paranormal documentaries?
My Amityville Horror and Amityville: An Origin Story are the strongest starting points because they're grounded in a single, well-documented case with decades of follow-up reporting, making it easier to compare the “haunting” claims against the verifiable historical record.
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