In the trailer for the film, young Janet describes how sometimes only she can hear the voice, except it doesn't feel like it's coming from inside her. The real Janet said the same thing: "I could hear them. It felt like it was behind me. Not within me." In an effort to prove this claim, there's a notable scene in the film during which Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) talks to the spirit while Janet's mouth is filled with water. This is also pulled from actual testimony. "At one point," Janet recalled, "Maurice Grosse taped my mouth, and filled my mouth up with water, and it still spoke."
In terms of possession, the film hyperbolizes the story quite a bit. It would seem there was no malevolent demon clinging to the soul of the spirit. What's more, while Janet did mention the voices and levitation, there's no evidence to suggest she floated into the air and threw furniture at her own family. Plenty of tense moments in the film have the fictional Janet acting like a demon-child straight out of something like The Exorcist. The real Janet describes a more docile nature in a Channel 4 documentary about the haunting. "I felt used by a force that nobody understands," she says. "I really don't like to think about it too much. I'm not sure the poltergeist was truly 'evil.' It was almost as if it wanted to be part of our family . . . It didn't want to hurt us. It had died there and wanted to be at rest."
