FAQ

The Campbell family—father Peter (Martin Donovan), mother Sara (Virginia Madsen), daughter Wendy (Amanda Crew), and son Matt (Kyle Gallner)—rent a house in upstate Connecticut in order to be close to the clinic where Matt is receiving treatment for cancer. Unfortunately, the house was a former mortuary with a dark past.

The Haunting in Connecticut is based on "In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting" (1992), co-authored by horror writer Ray Garton, paranormal investigators Ed Warren and Lorraine Warren, and Allen Snedeker Sr. and Carmen Reed. The story was brought to the screen by writers Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia (2013) was released in February 2013.

The movie is based on reports of paranormal activities that the Snedeker family experienced in their Southington, Connecticut house in the 1980s and on reports from the Warrens who investigated the house. There have since been numerous claims of inconsistencies in the reports, but it is not within the scope of an IMDb FAQ entry to credit or discredit either the reports or the claims. Ray Garton, author of "In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting", has since said that he made up many of the details at the insistence of Ed Warren. Other independent investigators have found many reasons to doubt the truth of the claims made, and those who lived in the house before and after the Snedekers reported nothing unusual.

It is ectoplasm, defined in the movie as "a mysterious protoplasmic substance streaming out of the bodies of mediums."

To put it simply, most of the differences result from a simple change of the black & white footage: in the unrated version most of these scenes are in color. But there are also some extended scenes and sometimes alternative shots were used but this Unrated version isn't that spectacular at all.