#olebornedal

1 hour 32 minutes

Rated PG-13 (Mature Thematic Material Involving Violence and Disturbing Sequences)

Directed by Ole Bornedal

Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kyra Sedgwick, Natasha Callis, and Matisyahu

2.5 out of 4 stars

IN THEATERS NOW.

Just to be clear, The Possession isn't based on a true story. It's INSPIRED by true events, but its story is all Hollywood. In the movie a cute little girl named Emily (Natasha Callis) and her sister, Hannah (Madison Davenport), spend the weekend with their deadbeat dad, Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who's just gotten a divorce from their mother, Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick). Emily is an adorable angel who's all excited because she's just become a vegetarian while her slightly older sister is a snotty aspiring dancer who reminds me of those middle school girls I had to deal with for three torturous years. One afternoon the three go to a yard sale where Emily comes across a cool-looking wooden box with Hebrew inscriptions on it. Clyde buys it for her and Emily opens it that night (what's weird is that the box doesn't have seams, so whoever made it didn't want anybody to open it...). Inside the box are weird little objects including a human tooth and a dead moth.

Then weird stuff starts to happen. Emily becomes increasingly distant and obsessive over the box. One night a thousand moths invade the house. The parents think she's just acting strange because of the divorce. Clyde thinks differently. He reads up about the box and discovers that it's a dybbuk (or dibbuk) box, which in Jewish folklore is a box where an evil spirit or demon would be put inside and trapped forever. Now that Emily has opened the box she's released the spirit and it will stop at nothing to get inside her body and live like a human. The only way to get the dybbuk back into the box, of course, is through an exorcism. There really is a cursed dybbuk box in the United States, but there was never a family that had it and was forced to perform an exorcism. In the opening of The Possession it reads "The following is based on a true story of a family's terrifying 28 days." FALSE. It's funny how Hollywood can just flat-out lie to the audience to earn a few bucks.

I know so much about the box because I'm President of my college's paranormal club and have been obsessed with ANYTHING paranormal since the day I was born. SyFy's paranormal reenactment show, Paranormal Witness (which is totally awesome you all should watch it), just had an episode where they detailed the history of the box. It was first purchased by Kevin Mannis, the owner of a small antique and furniture store in Portland, at an estate sale in 2001. The box was owned by the granddaughter of a Polish Holocaust survivor named Havela, who didn't allow anyone to open it because she claimed there was an evil spirit inside. Mannis thought whatever and opened it at his store. Then weird stuff happened. Poltergeist activity occurred in his basement and he started having recurring nightmares of an old hag trying to kill him. One day his mother visited the shop, saw the box, and then instantly suffered a near-fatal stroke. Mannis got so creeped out he put the box for sale on eBay. Truman State University student Iosif Neitzke found it on the website and bought it for him and his roommates. The weird activity happened again. The smell of cat urine would fill up the house, light bulbs would explode, and Iosif's hair started to fall out unexplainably. He then gave the box to Jason Haxton, the Director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri. Yet again strange things began to happen when Haxton opened it. He developed hives, welts, and blood-shot eyes on his body and even started coughing up blood. One night his young son and him were in their living room and saw a large mass of black energy floating around the room. He talked to some Rabbis who told him how to put the dybbuk back in the box. He did so successfully (apparently) and then put the box in a disclosed location. He, as well as the two previous owners, have reported no further activity.

That's a pretty creepy story, right? So why did The Possession have to change that and turn itself into a typical girl-possessed-by-bad-ghost exorcism movie? We've seen enough of those! Why can't Hollywood take a true-life ghost story and make it into a seriously creepy and believable horror movie? The Haunting in Connecticut is based on a VERY scary true haunting but the movie completely changes that and turns it into an unscary, unrealistic horror flick. The Amityville haunting has intrigued me for years, so how come when a remake of the The Amityville Horror came out in 2005 the people behind it had to make everything soooooooooooooo over-the-top and not true to fact and not scary at all?!?!?!?!?!? This has bothered me for years. The real former owner of the Amityville house, George Lutz, went so far as to sue the studio behind the movie because they portrayed him as a monstrous killer that tried to kill his family (which was not true at all). Good for him! Hollywood needs to stop worrying about money and try to make a true story horror movie as believable as possible.

The Possession isn't a train wreck of a horror flick. It has very good performances from everyone around. Morgan and Sedgwick are very believable at playing parents. No one can ever beat Linda Blair but Callis is just as great at being cute and terrifying. Even reggae musician Matisyahu does a decent job here as a rabbi who helps the family with the exorcism. I think the problem is that the movie is co-produced by Sam Raimi, who's famous for directing The Evil Dead series and Drag Me to Hell as well as producing lame-ass horror movies like The Grudge and Boogeyman. Raimi's horror movies are completely over-the-top which doesn't work for a movie that's based on real events. Then again, there were many moments in The Possession where I let go that it was based off the dybbuk box and embraced the over-the-top horror moments. A hand coming out of a little girl's mouth? A man's teeth falling out because a possessed girl is staring at him and causing it? A woman getting thrown across the room by an unseen force? For any horror fan these scenes are easy to like.

What bothered me though is that director Ole Bornedal has a few small horror moments that work but not enough. For example, Emily's teacher is working late in the school with the box in the other side of the classroom. She starts to hear distant whispers coming from the box. We can't make out the whispers. We don't hear a whisper cheesily say "Arghh I'm gonna kill you!" Then a brush of wind comes into the classroom. This works because of how simple it is. There's no over-the-top horror music playing in the background. This is a moment that genuinely made the hair stand up on my arms. There's a similar scene like this in the opening of the movie too. But that's it. Only two scenes. The rest of the movie is over-the-top but not scary. I would have wished that Bornedal stepped away from Raimi and made the movie more of his own. It looks like he's got great potential to make an effective horror movie with subtle scares.