Reviews / October 25, 2024
The Possessed
Directed by Jerry Thorpe
NBC (1977)
The ladies, eh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em and all the perfectionism, repressed frustrations, sexual/sibling rivalries, and fear of aging that make them the perfect conduits for Evil to manifest itself.
Before I’m rent limb from limb by justly enraged women, let me explain that those are not my sentiments: they’re the thesis that, at least superficially, seems to underpin 1977 TV Exorcist knock-off The Possessed. Because women—sorry, I mean Evil—is up to its old tricks as the academic year comes to an end in the Helen Page School for Girls in, natch, Salem. Not that Salem, though—Salem in Oregon, though the school is actually snooty Reed College in Portland, going incognito here because, despite annual tuition fees today of around $70,000, you presumably can never have enough cash to guarantee the kids of the elite the basic amenities they require.
Never fear, though: sullen ex-priest Kevin Leahy (James Farentino, who I will refer to mononymously as just “Farentino” not out of any desire to sound like a proper writer but rather because, like Sembello, when you’ve got a surname that punchy, the Christian name feels like it’s just dangling there to no real purpose) is here to pace gloomily and seemingly randomly around the corridors of the school until Evil is kicked the fuck back to hell. We first meet him still frocked but with his faith in tatters, sucking on a bottle of Jack Daniels in the sacristy and morosely pronouncing mass in a doomed-pilot-episode-esque flashback prologue. Driving home from the day job that evening, he drunkenly totals his car against a utility pole and finds himself facing the final judgement. He’s fallen from God’s grace, he’s informed, and his only hope for redemption is to “seek out evil and fight that evil by whatever means… possible.” Next thing you know, he’s been Lazarused back to life with a powerful “in this week’s episode” vibe.
Cut to the Helen Page School, where graduation is coming up. Our introduction to the place is an incongruous and oddly unnerving scene of screaming girls riding bikes along the school’s corridors, which is a nice way of evoking the charged atmosphere: the girls are restless to get the hell out of there, and the following year the school’s going co-ed, so everyone’s a little itchy, especially brittle and unhappy-seeming headmistress Louise Gelson (Joan Hackett), whose widower sister Ellen Sumner (Claudette Nevins) is a teacher at the school. Before long things start bursting into flames—curtains, pieces of paper, girls’ clothes. What’s the cause? Is it some kind of prank by the student body, bored teenage girls famously a nexus for mischief in the popular imagination? Is it Ellen’s daughter Weezie (Ann Dusenberry) pulling a Carrie? No—counterintuitively, it’s Han Solo.
Because the cause of the upset turns out to be hunky biology teacher Paul Winjam, played by a young Harrison Ford in what looks like his last role before Star Wars. After breaking off his secret fling with headmistress Louise, Paul’s now taken to fooling around with her niece Weezie. Plus, he’s also kind of a dick in other ways, as evidenced by his edgelord biology lessons where he gets his yuks by putting the girls on the spot to nominally teach them important lessons about fear. Before long, though, Winjam gets his comeuppance in a scene that feels weirdly and cathartically like the Indiana Jones franchise terminating itself with purifying flame. The film culminates in a poolside battle between good and evil that’s resolved by Farentino meting out a couple of hysteria-resolving, patriarchy-affirming slaps before nonsensically jumping into the water and disappearing into the limbo where un-picked-up pilots go to be judged.
Blatantly trying to ride the audience numbers of 1973’s The Exorcist, the same year’s Satan’s School for Girls, and 1976’s The Omen and Carrie, The Possessed is, predictably, imbued with the whole period’s ubiquitous post-Watergate feeling of gloom and hopelessness—so grim and overheated that at times even the stolid Farentino looks afraid. It’s almost as if the real supernatural force at play is the dumb joie de vivre of the almost-Gen-X teen schoolgirls pushing against the cynicism, fatalism, and malaise of the conscientious but emotionally misshapen adults. “Is this happening because of me?” asks a tormented Weezie. No, Weezie—it’s happening because of depressed boomers.
Written by John Sacret Young, who also wrote We Are the Mutants “favorite” (trauma nexus) Testament, directed by stalwart Jerry Thorpe, and starring a cast of troopers so seasoned they would never need refrigeration, The Possessed is more a work of competence than inspiration. And yet. Despite everything daft, derivative, pedestrian, and flagrantly sexist about it, The Possessed does somehow contrive to be unsettling. Like all horror that actually horrifies, as opposed to performing the spectacle of “horror,” there’s a vague sensation that even the people making it didn’t really grasp quite what they were channeling. It’s a feeling that lurks in inoffensive yet surreal scenes like the one where a group of girls prank their roommate by covering her bed with a disgusting pile of gunk, or that strange introductory image of the girls riding bikes through the corridors. I’ll be honest, I went into this review half-hoping to write a smug guffawing takedown, but the unhealthy miasma of repressed and unacknowledged emotion that fills the school and the film—and maybe Hollywood itself?— wrongfooted me completely.
As is often the case, the dreariness of the plot and the film’s visuals—which presage 1980’s The Changeling—actually contribute to its oppressive mood, and the cast all put in far more effort than a cheapo TV knock-off like this probably deserves. The poolside denouement is both oddly underwhelming and deeply strange—who the fuck ever got machine-gunned with the Nails of Christ?—and the possession make-up weirdly effective, however low-rent. And I can’t think of many other films where the sensations of being physically hot or cold seem quite so tangible.
In conclusion, The Possessed is gloomy fun, and it’s a shame it didn’t end up getting commissioned as a series. Who in their right mind wouldn’t have wanted to watch an episode of this shit every week to wash the foul taste of Highway to Heaven out of their mouth?
We Are the Mutants 