When I was nine years old, I saw a movie on television that would have a lasting effect on my life. That film was The Haunted – a made for TV movie about a family who suffered the effects of a demonic infestation in their house. I had a friend over and we were eating pizza when we saw a commercial for the movie, which announced that it would be starting in just a few minutes. We decided to ditch our plans of watching Tgif reruns and watch this instead. Our parents were out and we had been left to our own devices, so what better way to spend a Friday night than by watching a movie that most certainly would have been off limits if the parents had known anything about it?

The 1991 made-for-tv horror movie tells the purportedly true story of Jack and Janet Smurl and their family. In the late 1970s,...