What Actually Happens In The Possession And Why It Works
I just finished doing a frame-by-frame breakdown of The Possession for a film studies class I'm TAing, and it came up that people keep asking whether the found-footage approach actually sells the horror or just makes it cheaper. The answer is more complicated than a yes or no. The film follows the Nakamura family after Clyde buys a dresser at an estate sale. The dresser contains a dybbuk, a malicious spirit from Jewish folklore that attaches itself to an inanimate object. The possession centers on their youngest daughter, Hannah. It was released in 2013 and directed by Ole Bornedal, who originally made the Danish film The Possession in 1994 before this American remake version came out.
The Possession Unveiling The Facts Behind The Horror
From a production standpoint, what makes this one worth looking at is how it handles the dybbuk mythology. Most possession films invent their own rules on the fly. This one sticks closer to the actual folklore, which means the exorcism scenes follow a more specific logic than you typically see in the genre. The spirit needs a physical anchor, and that anchor is the chest of drawers. Break the object, weaken the bond, you have a chance at freeing the girl. That structure gives the filmmakers something concrete to work with instead of just having characters yell Latin at each other for ninety minutes. I spent an afternoon trying to figure out why certain jump scares in the second act don't land, and I think it comes down to the found-footage framing. When you're watching through the perspective of a camcorder, the audience is constantly aware they're watching someone record events. That distance creates a buffer that dulls the emotional impact. It's not that the scares are bad, they just hit differently because you're never fully inside the moment, you're always observing it through a lens. The same technique works brilliantly in Paranormal Activity because the camera stays fixed in one room for most of that film. Here, the handheld movement adds energy but subtracts presence. One thing most reviews miss: the performance by Brooklynn Prince as Hannah is genuinely unsettling, and not just because of the makeup or the voice effects. There's a sequence where she's sitting at the dinner table and she stares at her father without blinking for about twelve seconds straight. No music, no jump scare, just her watching him. That kind of sustained discomfort is harder to pull off than any CGI moment, and the kid nails it. She wasn't even a professional actor at the time, she was picked from an open casting call. That actually works in the film's favor because there's no learned technique getting in the way of something raw.
If you're looking to watch this, it's available on most major streaming platforms depending on your region. As of right now it's on Netflix in several markets and also shows up on Hulu. The Blu-ray release includes some decent supplementary material, particularly the featurette that breaks down how the practical effects were constructed for the physical possession sequences. The Dybbuk box prop alone took about three weeks to build, and they made multiple versions for different stages of damage throughout the film. There's a practical issue with the film's climax that I want to flag. The final exorcism sequence relies heavily on the dybbuk being physically removed from the object, but the rules established earlier in the movie about how the spirit transfers between hosts getuncleartoward the end. I ran into this problem when I was writing up my analysis paper and kept hitting a wall trying to reconcile the opening exposition with the ending. My workaround was to accept that the film operates on dramatic logic rather than strict internal consistency, which is fair enough for a horror movie but annoying if you're trying to use it as a case study in worldbuilding. The production budget was around fifteen million dollars, which is modest even for found-footage horror. That constraint shows in a few places, particularly in the (post-production) sound design. The film relies heavily on ambient noise and sudden loud moments rather than building tension through silence or gradual escalation. It's a valid choice but it means the auditory experience isn't as layered as something like The Conjuring, which came out the same year and used sound design as a primary storytelling tool.
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For anyone actually interested in the folklore side of things, the dybbuk concept comes from Kabbalistic tradition and the idea of a restless soul that possesses another living being or object. The film takes some liberties with the mythology, particularly around how easily a dybbuk can attach itself and how the exorcism ritual works. If you want the more accurate version, there are academic papers on Jewish mysticism that cover this in far more detail than any Hollywood film will. But as entertainment, thesimplifiedversion gets the job done. The film also stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays the father, and he brings a grounded quality that keeps the whole thing from tipping into pure camp. His character arc is pretty straightforward, but he commits to it. The scene where he realizes his daughter isn't his daughter anymore is one of the better moments in the film because it plays it completely straight, no exaggeration, just a man watching something impossible happen to his child. I've shown this film to several people who claim they don't watch horror and about half of them ended up actually being bothered by it. The other half said it was fine but forgettable. I fall somewhere in between, but I respect what the filmmakers were trying to do with the limited resources they had. The practical effects hold up reasonably well even years later, which says something in a genre where CGI tends to age poorly.
