CHAPTER FIVE
Sean Moreland
The subjective experience of possession, characterized primarily by the feeling of being influenced by an overpowering, alien force beyond one’s conscious control, shares much in common with the experiential aspects of many mental disorders. Cinematic attempts to capture the intensity of both experiences, often in an unsettling or disturbing way, have a long history. This chapter provides a brief, broad survey of how possession has been cinematically represented (especially in Anglo-American films) over the last century in ways that both explore and exploit these phenomenological intersections.
Throughout this chapter, the word possession will be used as shorthand for the concept anthropologist Felicitas Goodman calls “negative spirit possession,” but adulterated by what Carol J. Clover calls “occult possession.” According to Goodman, negative spirit possession includes a broad array of culturally specific phenomena that share the fundamental “experience of some uninvited evil entities assuming complete control over one’s body.”1 I employ Goodman’s more inclusive term rather than “demonic possession” because many of the films I discuss at least ostensibly posit something other than a specifically Christian supernaturalist conception to explain the troubling phenomena they screen. Clover’s term “occult possession,” on the other hand, is also more capacious than “demonic possession” but is specifically reserved for literary and filmic representations. It therefore usefully demarcates what I am discussing from the anthropological term “negative spirit possession,” emphasizing the fictive dimensions of these cinematic narratives, however much they purport to be grounded in “real” phenomena.
Whether or not the demonic is diegetically framed as the cause of the possession in these films, Judeo-Christian conceptions of the demonic color each of these representations to some degree. The cinematic and narrative devices used by filmmakers to represent possession have been powerfully shaped by notions and earlier representations of demonic possession. As Brian Levack points out, the intersections between cinema and possession date to well before the technological advent of film, going back to the connections between theatre and exorcistic rituals in early modern Europe, “when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson exploited the theatrical potential of the subject.” Since then
there has been a close reciprocal relationship between demonic possession and the theater. Possession and exorcism are intrinsically theatrical: the demoniac, the exorcists, and those who observe the afflictions of the possessed are all involved in a performance in which they follow scripts that are encoded in their religious cultures. They learn these scripts from reading reports of other possessions, listening to sermons of ministers, or following the rituals in exorcist manuals. Even if the parties are not aware that they are performers, they nevertheless act the way their religion expects them to act. This reciprocal relationship between possession and exorcism on the one hand and the theater on the other buttresses the argument that both possession and the films based on them, including The Devils (1971) and The Rite (2011) as well as The Exorcist, are also horror shows—productions that excite fear, shock, and revulsion in the audience.2
Indeed, filmic explorations of the devil, demons, and of the idea of possession were among some of the earliest subjects portrayed with the dawn of film, and later filmmakers, consciously or otherwise, have drawn upon and reimagined these treatments. While they are widely different in style and in their diegetic explanations for the possession (or possession-like phenomena) they screen, the films discussed here are united by shared narrative and cinematic conventions. Whether they treat possession as a metaphorization of mental illness, or use the phenomenological characteristics of certain mental illnesses as poetic devices for conveying the horror and anxiety of possession, each of these films draws (or at least attempts to draw) affective power from common anxieties about the loss of self-control and self-identity, and thus should be considered as part of a continuum of filmic possession narratives.
It is also important to note that negative spirit possession, certain types of mental illness, and related altered states of consciousness overlap phenomenologically, a fact that makes possession films potentially disturbing even to audiences who lack a shared cultural and religious framework in which demonic possession is accepted as a “real” phenomenon. This means that ultimately, whether the film’s diegesis presents the possession syndrome as explainable by naturalistic psychological principles (for example, in many films, some form of disassociative identity disorder, senile dementia, or depersonalization related to an epileptic condition function very much like an “uninvited evil entity”) or as caused by occult, supernatural forces, whether it uses mental illness as a red herring for what is eventually supernaturally explained (1973’s The Exorcist, 2014’s The Taking of Deborah Logan) or vice versa (2001’s Session 9, and more polemically 2006’s Requiem), the most effectively unsettling possession films are those that explore the subjective overlap between these conditions. However, those films that are most effectively terrifying or disturbing in their exploration are also arguably the most exploitative, since they run the greatest risk of demonizing mental illness, both figuratively and literally. This is true even when the possession in the filmic narrative is explicitly attributed to an alternative (that is, nondemonic) supernatural entity (for example, as in the 2012 film Possession, a dybbuk, or in the intriguingly execrable 1978 film Manitou, a vengeful Native American shaman) or a stated psychiatric cause (for example, the psychiatrist’s explanation of Norman Bates’s introjection of his mother’s persona in Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho).
It must also be noted that many modern clinical conceptions, including especially DID and epilepsy, are themselves importantly shaped by earlier conceptions of possession, and more broadly, the history of modern therapeutic psychology is deeply rooted in early modern European cultural conceptions of, and cultural practices linked to, witchcraft and demonic possession. Since the earliest advent of cinematic technologies in the last decade of the 19th century, however, film has both altered and interrogated the shifting interstices between the medicalization of mental illness, and still-widespread beliefs in the reality of possession.
From the earliest cinematic productions, some audience members have experienced watching film as a kind of compulsive and uncontrollable event; images flash by on the screen, and the senses are bombarded with visual, and later auditory, impressions that can produce powerful cognitive and affective responses. In this light, it is clear why film as a medium has had such a forceful correlation with narratives of spirit possession. Early cinema, arising contemporaneously with both psychoanalysis and modern clinical psychiatry near the close of the 19th century, was quick to explore the mingling of wonder and horror occasioned by the demonic. One of the earliest short films, Georges Méliès’s Le manoir du diable (1896), exploited the visual capabilities of this new technology to represent the powers of the devil in a way that had never before been seen. While Méliès’s film does not present the possessive powers long thought to be part of the devil’s supernatural arsenal, possession and exorcism would play a role in early American biblical epics. Sidney Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross (1912) briefly portrays Jesus’s curing of a demoniac as part of his early ministry. More dramatically, Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) features a lengthy scene of Jesus casting seven spectral demons (each based on one of the seven deadly sins; see Luke 8:2 and Mark 16:9) from Mary of Magdala. While the brief biblical accounts themselves offer no phenomenological description of the experiences of the possessed, DeMille’s film supplies something of this sort, and its phantasmagoric visuals and gender dynamics typologically anticipate those of The Exorcist and the many demonic possession films that follow it.
While they did not directly explore demonic possession, German expressionist classics including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, dir. Robert Wiene) and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922, dir. Fritz Lang) portray variations of hypnotic trance as inculcating a kind of possession, as does the American horror film White Zombie (1932), which features a racially and sexually ambiguous voodoo master possessing the bodies of his “zombies.” The Polish film adaption of S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk (1937, dir. Michal Waszynski) screens the phenomenon more directly, making it arguably the first feature film whose primary focus is occult possession.3 The dybbuk in this case is portrayed as the jealous spirit of the possessed Leah’s beloved suitor, Khonnon, whom her father had rejected. The film’s penultimate scene, in which Rabbi Azriel performs an elaborate exorcism to cast Khonnon’s spirit from Leah’s body, is both beautiful and harrowing, as is its conclusion, in which Leah chooses to join Khonnon in death rather than live without him. Ultimately, The Dybbuk is an entirely different breed of possession film from The Exorcist and its horrific spawn; it is a film, in Ira Konigsberg’s words, “about loss, about failed possibilities, about forlorn hopes,” and “about the scarce boundary between the living and the dead, about the interpenetration of the dead into the world of the living.”4 Yet it is also a film that speaks powerfully to the connection between loss and mourning, depression and self-destruction; in short, it aesthetically captures the psychological themes of Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) like no other film.
Overt spirit possession is, for the most part, absent from the films of the late 1930s through the late 1960s. The psychological experiences that possession films speak to, however, are not. Many post–World War II horror films explore the terrifying effects of alien influences, the loss of self-control, and self-identity and related anxieties. They tend to do so through more science-fictional, and less religious or mythic, conceits. Many films, most famously Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, dir. Don Siegel) portray extraterrestrial forces occupying human bodies in ways that clearly parallel spirit possession. Others, including The Manchurian Candidate (1962, dir. John Frankenheimer) displace malevolent spirits with malevolent Communist ideologies and brainwashing techniques to achieve related effects.
It isn’t until the early 1970s that the modern occult possession film takes to, and takes over, the screen. While it is The Exorcist (1973, written by William Peter Blatty, dir. William Friedkin) that primarily initiates this craze, it is important to note that Blatty and Friedkin’s film followed in the wake of a very different film about demonic possession, Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). Russell’s film is a sexual extravaganza that combines horror with eroticism and social satire, and is based on Aldous Huxley’s lightly fictionalized historical novel The Devils of Loudun (1952). Possession in Huxley’s novel, and in Russell’s film, has no supernatural trappings, but is instead explicitly attributed to a combination of religiously inspired mass hysteria and the consequences of repressed sexuality. Despite Huxley’s critical attitude toward Freud, Freud’s ideas on hysteria, repression, and female sexuality are in clear evidence in the novel, and Russell’s film exploits them visually to sensational effect. Nevertheless, it was not until the theatrical release of The Exorcist that the modern possession film’s popular formulae were truly established, and few films frame the interpretive tension between modern psychiatry and neuroscience and occult possession as forcefully as Friedkin’s.
A large portion of The Exorcist’s screen time is spent foregrounding the lengthy and disturbing course of examinations Regan is subjected to by medical professionals. These invasive tests build tension that the film’s subsequent scenes of exorcism serve as a catharsis for. In direct opposition to the cosmopolitan skepticism and liberal irony of The Devils, The Exorcist treats demonic possession as a serious, irreducibly supernatural and viscerally horrifying phenomenon. As Sharon Packer points out, “Director William Friedkin fretted about adding too much medical detail—yet he delighted in tapping into” contemporary medical controversies.5
As the authors of “Horror Films and Psychiatry” explain,
Initially Regan experiences non-specific behaviour changes which alarm her mother. Her doctor diagnoses ADHD and prescribes Ritalin which does not help. Medical tests (including neuroimaging) fail to demonstrate the aetiology. Regan develops seizures and agitation from being possessed, with her eyes rolling back, convulsions, foaming mouth, and purposeless violence. Seizures or pseudo-seizures have long been used to describe demonic possession. The differential diagnosis is wide, including psychotic disorders, mania, Tourette’s syndrome, conversion disorder, histrionic personality and dissociative identity disorder.6
While it draws on contemporary medicine and psychology, a large part of The Exorcist’s affective power derives from its gradual exhaustion of these as explanations. As terrified mother Chris MacNeil desperately seeks a cure for her daughter Regan’s nightmarish condition, she is failed time and again by medical and psychiatric authorities, until she and Father Damien Karras are driven to enlist the aid of Father Lankester Merrin in attempting to exorcise Regan. The Exorcist’s effect on many audience members was so powerful it convinced a number of them they, too, were suffering from demonic possession, eventually giving rise to the clinical concept of “cinematic possession neurosis.”
Ballon and Leszcz describe this condition, “often associated with horror films,” as one in which “psychotic disorders were associated with extreme cases of behavior resulting from film viewing,” in which the symptoms consisted “of dissociative phenomena, anxiety states, and paranoid ideation, involved the narrative or imagery of the film.”7 They explain that it is
a culturally shaped syndrome, whereby a film shapes the symptom presentation of pre-existing mental health conditions in vulnerable people. Vulnerable individuals include those who have issues with their identity, e.g. possessing varying degrees of borderline personality structures, and those coping with stress, such as a loss of a close relationship about which they feel ambivalent. A film’s content can result in the introjection of a powerful cultural symbol for evil to compensate for this loss, resulting in paranoid ideation, dissociative states, and anxiety, all of which are highly influenced and shaped by the film narrative.8
Beyond such cases in which The Exorcist synchronized powerfully with the pathological tendencies of individual audience members, it also tapped into increasing social anxieties about the power and influence of cinema itself. The Exorcist appeared at a moment when film studies emerged as a discipline heavily invested in Freudian psychoanalytic and structuralist Marxist theories that emphasized the power of cinema to influence audiences on a preconscious level. Film theorists including Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, and Robin Wood viewed film as a method of ideological interpellation, one that functioned primarily on an unconscious register. In the work of these thinkers at this time, film was seen as a vector for the ideological inhabitation of largely passive spectators, suggesting that possession could function as a metaphorization of spectatorship itself.
While The Exorcist’s critical and commercial success would spawn a legion of cinematic imitators, the link between film and possession would be differently sensationalized by many of the headlines and commentaries that appeared during the “Video Nasties” moral panic that surrounded straight-to-video horror films throughout the 1980s. Such accounts described impressionable youths and children as “obsessed” and “possessed” by horror films, driven to commit violent acts as a result of their influence. Horror films, many of them featuring demonic possession, became framed as possessive entities themselves. Such anxieties were simultaneously amplified and satirized by films including Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and its increasingly comedic sequels (1987, 1992), David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1984) and Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985). Raimi’s film offered a Grand Guignol variation on the theme of demonic possession as an epidemic that was, however differently envisioned, also the focus of The Devils. Cronenberg displaced the idea of a spiritual or demonic possessing entity altogether, replacing it with paranoiac, techno-organic version of Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media as a sensorial prosthesis. Bava’s film embodied the same anxieties that gave rise to cinematic possession neurosis by portraying an epidemic of demonic possession, visualized with gruesome physical transformations, occurring among the audience of an avant-garde grindhouse theatre, an idea that would be imitated by later films including The Video Dead (1987).
Other horror films from this period veered more toward naturalist psychological explanations, while still carrying over some of the uncanny horror of The Exorcist. The indie horror/thriller film Pin (1988, dir. Sandor Stern), for example, portrays a young man whose dissociative, and eventually psychotic, behaviors are portrayed in ways that parallel demonic possession. Similarly, the unsettling and atmospheric film Session 9 (2001, dir. Brad Anderson), shot primarily in the abandoned Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts before its demolishment, probes the parallels between abuse-triggered dissociative identity disorder and possession.
The first decades of the 21st century have seen a greater focus on exploiting the resemblance between demonic possession and unusual epileptic conditions on the one hand, and on the idea of demonic possession as a kind of epidemic contagion on the other. The perceived connection between epilepsy and possession is an ancient one. Owsei Temkin explains that the “morbid conditions with which epilepsy in the Western world becomes increasingly associated from about the beginning of the Christian era” are subsumed under possession, “ascribed to the intrusion of a god, demon, or ghost into the body of a hitherto normal individual who now behaves like a willing or reluctant instrument of the intruder.”9
Sallie Baxendale adds, “The association of epilepsy with supernatural possession, represented in art forms throughout the ages […] remains a popular theme in 21st-century cinema,” with many films reinforcing “the idea that seizures open up a portal to a demonic (or less frequently, divine) realm.”10 While The Exorcist had previously emphasized the failed attempts of Regan’s doctors to explain her condition as related to epilepsy, three more recent films, each of them loosely based on the tragic case of Anneliese Michel (1952–1976), reinforce this association. Michel had been diagnosed with epilepsy, depression, and depressive psychosis before undergoing, at her own insistence and that of her pious Catholic parents, a harrowing series of exorcisms that eventually culminated in her death. This case became the subject of Felicitas Goodman’s influential study The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel, which in turn was the major inspiration for Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005).
While it finally pushes the viewer toward a supernatural interpretation of events, this legal procedural/supernatural horror hybrid emphasizes the resemblance between Emily’s possessed state and her epileptic-like seizures. In Baxendale’s words,
Although there is a superficial battle of science vs. the church in the courtroom, viewers are left in little doubt as to the supernatural nature of Emily’s afflictions in the flashback sequences. No least, because supernatural happenings gradually creep into the main narrative, as the story unfolds in the courtroom. While it is not for clinicians to dictate the shape or form of any artistic endeavor, “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” is troubling, not only because this 21st-century treatment reinforces the ancient links between demonic possession and epilepsy but also because the strapline for the film is “Based on a True Story.”11
Hans-Michael Schmidt’s more somber and less exploitative treatment of Anneliese Michel’s story, Requiem (2006) pushes the interpretive envelope in the other direction, clearly underlining mental illness stemming from epilepsy as the root of its young victim-protagonist’s suffering. Requiem is a powerfully understated and sympathetic film, but it reached a much smaller audience than Derrickson’s genre hit, which inspired a slew of low-budget imitators, most egregiously the wretchedly exploitative and tediously formulaic Anneliese: The Exorcism Tapes (2011) and the slightly more imaginative The Devil Inside (2012).
The demonic-possession-as-contagious-epidemic, on the other hand, was popularized by the inventive Spanish mockumentary horror film Rec (2007, dir. Jaume Balaguero), its Spanish-language sequels, and its American remake Quarantine (2008, dir. John Pogue and John Erick Dowdle). While the Spanish films overtly attribute their horrific epidemic to a weaponization of the demonic, Quarantine downplays the demonic dimensions of its epidemic, following earlier epidemic horror films including 28 Days Later (2002) in emphasizing instead a bioweaponized variation of rabies.
More interesting in their exploration and exploitation of the subjective overlap between possession and mental illness are two recent possession films, the American indie mockumentary The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014, dir. Adam Robitel) and the stylish Australian horror film The Babadook (2014, dir. Jennifer Kent). The Taking of Deborah Logan links demonic possession not to a trauma-induced dissociative state or to an epileptic condition, but to senile dementia. Presenting itself as part of a documentary film about the effects of Alzheimer’s, the film begins by harrowingly documenting the disintegration of Deborah’s memory, personal identity, and relationship with her friends and family, ostensibly due to the progression of her illness. As the film continues, overtly supernatural elements emerge and intensify, and by its midpoint the film has abandoned any semblance of psychological subtlety, gleefully embracing its occult possession theme and horror-genre conventions.
With its striking visual echoes of German expressionist films including Nosferatu and Caligari, and classic American horror films including The Shining (1980) and The Exorcist, The Babadook pays homage to the many cinematic treatments of possession that influenced its creation. It deals with possession as a way of allegorizing grief and trauma, the interpenetration of the living by the dead, and is in this respect much closer to Waszynski’s film The Dybbuk than it is to The Exorcist. The Babadook attains a memorable balance between exploiting mental illness as a source of fear and horror and exploring possession as a way of sympathetically and imaginatively portraying the crushing power of isolation, anxiety, and grief. At the same time, its extensive use of visual reference and homage enables it to uniquely explore the long-shared history between occult possession and mental illness in film, making it an ideal note on which to conclude this chapter.
Notes
1. Felicitas Goodman, How About Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 88.
2. Brian Levack, “The Horrors of Witchcraft and Demonic Possession,” Social Research 81, no. 4 (2014): 921–939.
3. A term I take from Carol Clover’s essay “Opening Up,” as it is more capacious than “demonic possession” but also somewhat divorced from the anthropological term “negative spirit possession” used by writers including Patrick McNamara and Felicitas Goodman, which I hope will emphasize the fictive dimensions of these cinematic narratives, however much they are, or purport to be, grounded in “real” phenomena. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 65–113.
4. Ira Konigsberg, “The Only ‘I’ in the World: Religion, Psychoanalysis, and ‘The Dybbuk,’ Cinema Journal 36, no. 4 (1997): 22.
5. Sharon Packer, “Demon Drugs or Demon Children,” Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors, Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland, eds. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 175.
6. Susan Hatters Friedman, Fernando Espi Forcen, and John Preston Shand, “Horror Films and Psychiatry,” Australasian Psychiatry 22, no. 5 (2014): 447–449.
7. B. Ballon and M. Leszcz, “Horror Films: Tales to Master Terror or Shapers of Trauma?” American Journal of Psychotherapy 61, no. 2 (2007): 211–230.
8. Ballon and Leszcz, 224.
9. Temkin, Owsei, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 86.
10. Baxendale, Sallie, “Epilepsy on the Silver Screen in the 21st Century,” Epilepsy & Behavior 57 (2016): 270–274.
11. Baxendale, 271.