Reenactments and home-video footage anchor The Devil on Trial, a 2023 documentary that revisits one of the most unusual criminal defenses ever argued in a U.S. courtroom.
What is The Devil on Trial about?
The Devil on Trial reconstructs the events surrounding a young boy in Connecticut whose family and investigators came to believe he was possessed, and the violent aftermath that followed once an exorcism was attempted. Director Chris Holt builds the film from archival home-video material alongside dramatized reenactments, letting family members and investigators describe what they witnessed in their own words rather than narrating events from a distance. The documentary treats the case's most notorious element head-on: a legal defense that leaned on claims of possession rather than a conventional psychiatric argument, a strategy that made the case a media fixture at the time and has kept it in true-crime conversation since. Rather than settling the question of what really happened, the film lays out the testimony, the reenactments, and the courtroom record side by side and lets viewers weigh them for themselves.
About the cast
Arne Cheyenne Johnson, the figure at the center of the original case, appears in the documentary alongside the family members and investigators whose accounts the film is built around, giving the reenactment-heavy structure a direct link to the people who lived through the events.
Context & significance
Released in 2023, The Devil on Trial arrived amid a wider run of documentaries revisiting decades-old possession and exorcism cases, several of which have drawn renewed attention through fictionalized horror adaptations of the same events. At 81 minutes, it keeps a tight focus on the investigation and trial rather than expanding into broader commentary on the paranormal.
Watching The Devil on Trial on Ktime
The documentary streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing available; K-Time's Farsi-first interface makes it easy for Persian-speaking viewers to browse and watch true-crime and documentary titles like this one. A free K-Time account login is required to stream, though the site itself is free to read and explore.