The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Possession concerns the belief that the human body can be inhabited and control taken over by another entity. Ever since the massive success of The Exorcist (1973), cinema has been dominated by cliches of the demonically possessed being fought off by Catholic priests chanting rituals of exorcism.
Most commonly in cinema the possessing entity is taken to be a demonic force usually of the Christian variety, although there are many examples of possession that come from other cultures. There a good many other works dealing with possession by spirits of the dead or malevolent entities.
Possession is almost always something that is seen as an evil that necessitates a battle for the possessee’s body. More recent years have shown a tendency towards gonzo treatments showing everything from possessed vehicles, items of furniture and laundry presses.
For more detail and an overview of the genre see the Theme Essay Possession Films.
Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sanchez makes a film that sits in a fascinatingly ambiguous place as to whether a wife is being haunted/possessed or is mentally disintegrating
A unique film about a woman who is pursued by a demon that loves her. The film is made in a challenging style that requires considerable adeptness to follow but proves rewarding
The Hollywood remake of The Hands of Orlac, a classic with Colin Clive as a pianist who believes he is possessed after receiving hands transplanted from a killer. With a fascinatingly demented performance from Peter Lorre
Likeable Canadian-made children’s film where Mark Harmon and kids come to rescue of a lake monster
The single worst Stephen King adaptation ever made. Director Tobe Hooper fails to approach the story of a possessed laundry press with the same drollness that King did and inflates it into something ridiculous
A B-budgeted hit from the video era concerning a possessed housewife. This is a film that has only ever been construed around the provision of cheap makeup effects at regular intervals, all of which hold an undeniable entertainment value in their cheesy ridiculousness
Videogamers fight a demonic entity unleashed from a 1980s game. A film that is far more fun that you expect and comes loaded with videogaming in-jokes
Light fantasy comedy where Glenn Close plays a housewife who is possessed by the ghost of Maxie, a Hollywood starlet who is determined to revive her career
May the Devil Take YouThe Evil Dead. Here Timo Tjajjanto makes a sequel and goes absolutely demented
Indonesia’s Timo Tjahjanto has emerged as a Must Watch director on the basis of his jaw-dropping brutal action films plus assorted ventures into horror. Here he pays homage to the 1980s horror films in particular to The Evil Dead
A Thai possession film shot Found Footage. This takes place among very different cultural rituals, which makes a welcome difference to the cliches that dominate Western possession films, and builds up to something quite out there
Mike Flanagan horror mini-series adapted from Christopher Pike’s book, this is set around a group of patients in a hospice who form a group to tell each other horror stories
Low-budget action film with Dolph Lundgren as a modern-day Knights Templar tasked with preventing The Devil returning to Earth at the millennium
Alexandre Aja film about haunted mirrors. Aja is more a director of physical horror and seems less attuned to the supernatural mood
Henry Selick’s first venture into live-action in which Brendan Fraser becomes trapped in a bizarre afterlife while a mischievous monkey steals his body
Delightful motion capture animated film about children discovering a neighbourhood house that is alive. Written with refreshingly well-rounded characters and directed with a great sense of comic grotesque
A Young Adult fantasy adaptation that fells a Harry Potter wannabe repackaged with the brooding teen romanticism of the Twilight series, all under a director whose indifferent handling fails to animate any of the material
Another of the Mickey Mouse horror films that emerged when the character entered public domain. This features a Mickey Mouse masked killer pursuing teens through an amusement arcade
Takashi Miike tv mini-series with a mind-bogglingly confusing plot involving a split personalitied detective, possession, a terrorist pop star and barcodes imprinted in eyeballs
This was the fourth and second to last of Universal’s Mummy films with Lon Chaney Jr in the role of Kharis. By now the series has been reduced to a well-worn formula
Possession film that is quite a bit more than the light fluffy Young Adult film the title makes it seem, boosted by a great performance from Amiah Miller
A mind-bogglingly deranged example from the largely unexplored arena of Indonesian exploitation cinema as an American woman becomes involved with local witchcraft
A Halloween horror from a director with a reasonable genre association, this establishes its genre bona fides but then shoots itself in the foot
A psychologist is sent in to interview a killer facing execution who makes the claim he is possessed by a demon. Despite being made by the people behind God’s Not Dead, this is actually a well-made and captivating film
Sequel to a film that few people remember, this is all campy one-liners and gory set-pieces conducted with a silliness that boggles the mind
Another pointless remake of an 80s horror film. The original was a cheap Evil Dead ripoff driven by cheesy effects; this provides more professional effects but only becomes a slickly produced assemblage of cliches we have seen dozens of times before
A Blumhouse and James Wan co-production about a malevolent swimming pool
A above average entry in the recent trend of horror anthologies featuring episodes from different directors, including Joe Dante and Mick Garris, featuring at least a couple of standout entries
This has an interesting set-up about a woman pursued by a boogeyman figure from her nightmares where others cannot be sure whether she is delusional at the same time as the figure starts eliminating them – but the film’s low-budget gets in the way of adequate treatment
The first and worst of the A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. The dream logic becomes incoherent, while the film is twisted out of shape to become a bizarre gay Coming Out parable
An 80s Scream Queen film featuring Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer as sorority girls who become possessed. From director David DeCoteau
Riding on his fame as Freddy Krueger in the Elm Street films, actor Robert Englund made his directorial debut here but the film is lumbered with the lame concept of a demonic phone line
The Bollywood horror film is a rare and strange beast – what other horror film would you see that comes with song and dance numbers? This is a Bollywood possession film where, despite the use of local colour and custom, it is surprisingly still drawn from the cliches created by The Exorcist
Another spinoff from The Conjuring films. James Wan is one of the finest horror directors of the 2010s but has had difficulty imparting his skills to the directors of the films he has produced. This feels like a fairground haunted house show of tedious and repetitive pop-up shocks that runs free of any connection to a plot
More from James Wan’s The Conjuring Universe, this places more focus on mood and atmosphere than The Nun’s ludicrous jump effects
Al Adamson was a director whose output closely resembled that of Edward D. Wood, Jr. This was Adamson’s contribution to the 1970s fad for possession and exorcism films, although is a dull film lacking even in many of the shock tropes that the other Exorcist copies pulled off
Lush Magical Realist adaptation of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book about demonic possession that takes the view that it is no more than Church superstition
Singaporean film that offers an assemblage of cliches elements from various horror films in a mishmash of hauntings, possession, occult happenings and ominous Biblical portents that make little sense in terms of explanatory rationale
Undeniably reminiscent of the standout The Vigil, a horror film set around an Orthodox Jewish funeral home that creates great uncanny mood
From Johannes Roberts, the director of 47 Meters Down and other works, an undeniably spooky variant on Pet Sematary set in Mumbai as a mother unwittingly resurrects her late son’s spirit
Another title jumping on the fad for ouija board films we’ve had since Blumhouse’s Ouija series, this concerning an ouija board that has a malevolent spirit trapped inside it. Routine tension by the numbers – possessed people with glowing eyes are just not that scary
Blumhouse’s Ouija didn’t get many good reviews but they proceeded with a prequel here. This is automatically the better film from the outset by employing Mike Flanagan, behind amazing works like Absentia, Hush and The Haunting of Hill House, as director, even if it comes out as one of Flanagan’s lesser works
A cheapie from cult Ozploitation director Brian Trenchard-Smith about a man having clairvoyant visions of an astral killer
No-budget film that became a word of mouth hit, spawned a series of sequels and sparked off the Found Footage fascination that took over the 2010s. Unlike most of the films that followed, Oren Peli creates a creepingly chill atmosphere and some undeniable jumps
For supposedly the Paranormal Activity series final entry, this offer the novelty of the first Found Footage film in 3D – a gimmick that signals the series is out of fresh ideas. Moreover, the series’ look via watching security cameras has been de-emphasised in favour of another CGI driven ghost story
Less another sequel than a spinoff of the Paranormal Activity series, this takes place with Latino characters and in a whole different culture and socio-economic strata. While this gives the series a face change, everything else it feels like the shuffling of a well-worn deck of plot cards
Loosely set around the legend of Typhoid Mary with ghostbusters investigating an abandoned asylum. One of a host of films that automatically relegate themselves to B movies by borrowing the prefix ‘Paranormal’, this sits between the amateurish and occasionally interesting
A party bus is stranded in the desert and surrounded by Satanists. At least this is a film that you cannot complain delivers exactly what it promises – plentiful toplessness, gore and cheesy creature effects
One of the best and most underrated Dean R. Koontz adaptations, which creates eerie atmosphere out a town where the residents have disappeared due to what is revealed as a uniquely different creature
In the same vein as The Conjuring films, a film about a true-life Spanish team of paranormal investigators
A painfully amateurish zombie films – the entire show has been shot in someone’s house. There are only two gore effects throughout and the titular platoon the soldiers is limited to only three in number
A film based on the true-life figure of the Vatican’s official exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth this could have been great but descends into tedious hokum
This was a copy of The Exorcist made for tv. Unable to replicate that film’s gross-out effects, all that we get is a girl’s boarding school beset by supernatural fires. An amazing cast line-up, including an unknown Harrison Ford as a teacher having an affair with a pupil before getting set on fire
Early film from Danish director Anders Rønnow-Klarlund. This starts out as a plague outbreak drama and then does a bizarre mid-film twist to become a possession film
Steven E. de Souza directs a film that supposedly tells the true story that inspired The Exorcist but in practice is just another excuse to trot out the possession and exorcism cliches
Based on the urban legend surrounding a dybbuk box that turned up on an EBay auction, although the film throws this out to conduct an utterly generic possession story. Despite the novelty of drawing on Judaic mythology, the film still trades in the same tired cliches as the Christian exorcism film
This predates The Exorcist in its possession themes where Perry King becomes possessed by the spirit of a Puerto Rican killer
Franck Khalfoun, a former Alexandre Aja associate, who has made the quite reasonable likes of P2 and the remake of Maniac, directs a desert island survival story where the jungle lurks with horrors
Daniel Stamm, the director who made the standout
The possession and exorcism film has become a heavily exhausted one, having cycled through the same limited bag of tricks for the last 40 years. This South Korean take still mines the same territory but adds some nifty new tricks to build to a riveting climax
One of the less successful, nevertheless underrated John Carpenter films where he pays tribute to Nigel Kneale in a conceptually mind-boggling mix of deviltry and quantum physics
The fourth of The Prophecy films about war between angels, the first to be made without Christopher Walken with Sean Pertwee as a detective in Bucharest who is drawn in
English-language remake of the Spanish Found Footage film [Rec]. A lesser work but in the hands of John Erick Dowdle one of the few English-language horror remakes that stands up to the original
One of the rare Bollywood ventures into horror, a blatant copy of The Exorcist. You have to praise the film for trying out every effect in the book in an effort to get a jump but the result ends up being so overwrought it produces almost no effect at all
For some reason, The Exorcist is hugely popular in Bollywood horror – this is the fourth in a series of otherwise unrelated films about possession. The film conducts its borrowings not unentertainingly and is boosted by a script that turns what we think is happening on its head with quite a degree of dexterity
![[Rec] (2007) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-2007-poster-3.jpg)
Furious and highly engaging Spanish Found Footage film about the infected dead taking over an apartment building. Three sequels and an English-language remake followed
![[Rec] 2 (2009) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-2-2009-poster.jpg)
Lesser sequel to the Spanish Found Footage zombie film [Rec] that repeats the original to variable effect but needlessly breaks up the single camera point-of-view
![[Rec]3 Genesis (2012) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-3-genesis-2012-poster.jpg)
Third entry in the Spanish Found Footage series. The Found Footage look is abandoned soon in but this decides to have fun and turns out the gore-drenched goods
![[Rec]4 Apocalypse (2014) poster](https://moriareviews.com/rongulator/wp-content/uploads/rec-4-apocalypse-2014-poster.jpg)
The fourth film in the [Rec] series. This abandons the Found Footage look but without it, all we have is just another zombie film, nevertheless this builds to an intensively gore-drenched climax
A film about a possessed refrigerator!
This wants to conduct an Airplane styled parody of The Exorcist to which extent it conducts the coup of casting a grown-up Linda Blair
This should be mandatory viewing after watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose. While that film rewrote the tragedy of Anneliese Michel as a film about possession, this German-made production sets things straight and tells a story about a girl with mental health issues
This BBC tv mini-series starts out seeming a mystery about the disappearance of a child as the investigating heroine makes the jolt realisation that she is the missing child, before the show edges over into occult conspiracy. Very nicely written and beautifully directed with a line-up of standout performances
Alien scripter Dan O’Bannon jumps aboard the 80s/early 90s fad for H.P. Lovecraft adaptations is this directorial outing that eventually develops quite reasonable effect
Interestingly watchable 80s film where a man becomes possessed by a disembodied soul that sets out seeking revenge against its killers. With lots of entertainingly lurid despatches
The first film from Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves. A blatant copy of Mario Bava’s i>Black Sunday that is done in by its cheapness, a lack of anything interesting happening and mismatched comedy elements
The second of the Japanese Ring/Ringu films where director Hideo Nakata improves over the original with a series of eerie scares if a frequently incomprehensible mishmash of story ideas
Sequel to The Ring, the English-language remake of Ringu. The filmmakers have returned to the source and brought in original director Hideo Nakata only to produce one of the most disappointing of all the Ringu/Ring films
A sequel to R.I.P.D. that tells an origin story of how the sheriff character played by Jeff Bridges in the original became an afterlife enforcement officer
Full-blooded possession and exorcism that takes its Catholic cant seriously and emerges as dramatically gripping, with Anthony Hopkins delivering a tour-de-force performance. Supposedly based on a true story.
A film based on what is said to be the most well-documented exorcism in US history. Al Pacino plays the exorcist
The underrated Curtis Harrington makes a quickie possession film about a haunted drive-in theatre. Cast soon after Carrie, the film is headed by a fierily passionate performance from Piper Laurie
Sarah Snook stars in an Australian ghost story in which her daughter seems to become possessed by the sister who went missing years ago
Cult Polish film that is a series of tall tales nested within a labyrinth of other tales and digressions
Fred Olen Ray is one of the most prolific genre directors. This film about a cursed Indian graveyard was made earlier in his career. Olen Ray hasn’t exactly become a good filmmaker since but his subsequent films are at least made with a overall competence and a sense of humour, which this lacks
An incredibly bad film from the heyday of the VHS era. The incoherent plot involves hauntings and a voodoo curse before arriving at a totally surreal ending
The first of the Scary Movie sequels. The Wayans Brothers extend the gag beyond the slasher movie to take on the ghost story and exorcism film while aiming squarely for Lowest Common Denominator humour
Just when you thought that this witless and unfunny series has died off, it drags itself out of mothballs for another outing. As with the other entries, it is a bunch of recent movies overrun with crude, moronic gags
The last film from the great Mario Bava – an uncanny effort filled with some strikingly spooky scenes that leaves you uncertain whether what we are seeing is a haunting, a possession or is taking place in a mad woman’s fraying mind
Fairly by-the-books possession and exorcism film that does have the novelty of playing out in a morgue and where the entire cast has been pared down to four. There also seems an earnest strain of belief in Christianity/Catholicism that runs throughout
Medieavel fantasy action film with Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman assigned to escort a witch who may be able to deliver the land from the Black Plague. The wider moral issues of the film are buried under action and CGI
An attempt to copy Ghostbusters concerning a psychic detective agency that degenerates into painfully bad slapstick
The fifth and most enjoyable of the Chucky films, this amplifies the black humour to an outrageously funny level, while conducting an hilarious meta-fiction with Jennifer Tilly playing herself
One of Wes Craven’s best films. Loosely based on true-life book by botanist Wade Davis who set out to find the drug that creates zombies, Craven delves into Haitian voodoo in a striking blend of dream and horror
Positively the most insane, offensive and over-the-top film I have seen in some time. A bride finds she has a vagina possessed by Satan and uses it to go all I Spit on Your Grave on the gang who ate her husband on her wedding night, resulting in an outrageous splatter bloodbath
Wes Craven’s attempt to top his A Nightmare on Elm Street and the phenomenon that Freddy Krueger subsequently became was this remarkably silly film with Mitch Pileggi as a serial killer returned from the electric chair
A piece of filler horror that is utterly generic in every respect about travelers entering a sinister East European village where the locals are up to no good
A horror film set around a haunted house attraction that is made with near-total amateurishness. The film seems to have multiple plots happening all at once and becomes impossible trying to figure out what is happening
Low-budget film about a team of FBI ghost hunters investigating an abandoned prison where mysterious things are going on
Peter Cushing-Christopher Lee vehicle from Amicus with Cushing as a collector who obtains the Marquis de Sade’s possessed skull. One of the more over-rated Anglo-horror films, this feels more like an episode from one of their anthologies than a full film