The Conjuring: Last Rites confronts the Warrens’ past

The Conjuring: Last Rites is the final curtain call for one of horror’s biggest franchises. It hit theaters on September 5, 2025, and wraps up James Wan’s blockbuster series about paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.

Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson have played the couple for over a decade, showing them as devoted partners battling evil with faith and love. But The Conjuring: Last Rites hints that the real darkness haunting the Warrens wasn’t supernatural --- it was their own complicated history!

While the movies paint them as heroic ghost hunters, the real Warrens’ story has plenty of messy edges. The Conjuring: Last Rites tackles that tension head-on. We thus witness one of their most famous and final cases, with personal struggles, and the couple faces demons no crucifix can defeat.

Ready? Read on.

How real is the plot of The Conjuring: Last Rites?

The movie starts on a profoundly personal note: the night Judy Warren was born in 1964. Young Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Orion Smith and Madison Lawlor) barely escape a failed exorcism involving a cursed mirror.

They rush to the hospital, where their newborn daughter is stillborn. The Warrens pray desperately, and Judy revives. So, Judy might have carried darkness from her birth. That idea of inherited evil runs through the film.

Grown-up Judy (Mia Tomlinson) now wrestles with her parents' ghost-hunting legacy while building a future with fiancé Tony (Ben Hardy). Director Michael Chaves (who also helmed The Devil Made Me Do It) delivers some of the franchise's tensest scenes, one of which is a wedding dress fitting inside a maze of mirrors; the other is a tape being rewinded to catch who blew out candles on a cake --- we won't spoil it, but guess who it was?

Anyway, the film adapts the infamous Smurl Family case in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. For years, the Smurls reported violent poltergeists, shadow figures, and physical attacks during the 1980s. The Warrens investigated, but the Smurl haunting was never fully resolved, so there was room for imagination.

The Warrens’ very haunted real-life legacy

That tension between horror-movie thrills and messy real-life history is what grabs people about The Conjuring: Last Rites.

The real Ed and Lorraine Warren built their name through hustle. Ed would paint haunted houses to get inside, and Lorraine practiced her psychic skills. They started the New England Society for Psychic Research in 1952.

But their story isn't clean.

Critics say they exaggerated cases, like the Annabelle doll story. There are darker claims too: an alleged long affair Ed had with a teenager, accusations that they faked ghost photos, and talk of domestic abuse within the Warrens.

None of that made it into the movies. Reportedly, contracts demanded the Warrens look good. So the Conjuring series sits in a weird spot.

It always leaned hard on the "based on true events" angle, even when facts got fuzzy. Now, with The Conjuring: Last Rites being the finale, were the Warrens haunted by ghosts, or is the real horror what they created themselves?

What happens in The Conjuring: Last Rites finale?

The Conjuring: Last Rites cranks up the scares and hits harder emotionally than recent films in the series. Yet its message remains that love wins. That might sound corny, but it's always been the franchise's foundation.

Here, the Warrens' marriage is their weapon against evil and a way to sidestep real-world controversies about them. So, when the credits roll, audiences might find themselves debating more than just the Smurl family's haunting. The question of whether Ed and Lorraine Warren were truly the heroic demon hunters Hollywood portrayed is more complicated.

The Conjuring: Last Rites challenges us to decide if the duo are saints, frauds, or human beings caught somewhere in between.