Art Exhibit CONTEXT

By Saul Sudin

What can one do to reinvigorate the often tired and predictable horror genre? For a category of movies infinitely reliant upon upping the ante and scaring your audience in new and unexpected ways, the best of our filmmakers often strive to creatively answer this question. Many times, the answer is found in reality. After all, what is scarier than the true life horrors and their filmic counterparts in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (murderer Ed Gein), The Hills Have Eyes (Scottish cannibal legends the Sawney Bean family), or The Amityville Horror (a haunted house on Long Island, NY)? For horror innovator Sam Raimi and his producing partner Rob Tapert, they found their inspiration for the newly releasing The Possession in a real life Dybbuk box that had left a trail of ill-fated and unbelievable scares before ending up on eBay in 2004, where it made national news. Unfortunately, by the time this questionably haunted object steeped in Jewish folklore made its way to the big screen directed by Ole Bornedal with a script by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, any real horror was stripped away by an adaptation bogged down in clichés and disjointed themes.

The film opens with the mysterious torture of an elderly woman who is under of the control of whatever spirit emanates from the old, wooden Dybbuk box.  She is thrashed about the room by an unknown force, seemingly punished for attempting to harm or destroy the box which sits upside down on her mantle, making it difficult for even those audience members who can read Hebrew letters to discern the writing on its side. In any film, there are rules established about what a supernatural power is capable of but here the ability to maim or kill nearby people at will is used inconsistently throughout the film- wherever convenient for the box protecting itself from those that would seek to harm it- and yet, we wait and wait and it never uses this ability on our protagonist, good guy basketball coach Clyde Brenek (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whose daughter Em (Natasha Calis) becomes infatuated with the box after purchasing it at the old woman’s garage sale. Em and her older sister Hannah (Madison Davenport), both at awkward pubescent ages, are dealing with the recent divorce of their dad from their mother Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick),who is dedicated to undercutting Clyde at every stage, whether it is quickly excising his things from their old house or flaunting her new boyfriend Brett (Grant Show).

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