60 Nights of Horror 2022 # 1: Possession (1981)

Alright, alright, alright, let’s begin 60 Nights of Horror 2022 with a bang by also announcing that it is officially Sam Neill Week. I will be giving notes on each movie I watch, either alone or with friends, and posting them in blog form because sometimes I have more to say than will fit in an IG post. And that’s okay!

Sam Neill Week will begin with Possession (1981).

It's important to remember that Andrzej Żuławski made this film in the wake of his own tumultuous divorce. The backstory: After Żuławski's wife left him and his subsequent nervous breakdown, he spontaneously came home after a few weeks in a hotel to find his young son covered in jam, seemingly abandoned by his mother.

This movie is a male's experience of watching a woman leave him, and his subsequent trip through the stages of grief.

At the center is Mark, a spy who has returned to Berlin from a mission abroad to find his wife despondent and checked out of the marriage entirely. Anna, though she won't admit it to Mark or to herself, has discovered a life beyond the nuclear family, and is consumed by guilt for abandoning the behavior that was expected of her as a wife and mother. Her behavior appears irrational through the eyes of her husband, Mark, but also Żuławski, who is telling the audience "look at this crazy woman, look what I had to put up with." Anna's insistence on independence looks like madness in the eyes of Mark: she keeps secrets, she disappears, she is living outside of his gaze, and of course her biggest shame: she is fucking an octopus monster.

Fundamentally what Mark cannot bear is that she doesn't want to fuck HIM. She tells Mark that she's been fucking her side piece Heinrich, a Mama's boy of no profession who has introduced her to Eastern philosophy and psychedelics. At first Mark finds his suave, accepting, "enlightened" behavior intimidating but this is quickly diminished when he realizes Anna has been playing Heinrich as well. Not even Heinrich is enough for her. Hell, Mark is a literal SPY and he's not enough. It blows his mind that he's not enough.

I want to say that comes down to Andrzej Żuławski fantasizing about being a spy, because what man hasn't fantasized about being a spy?

When Mark discovers the tentacle monster he says "oh she must be bewitched, she must be possessed, that's the only explanation, it is something more than me, something more than human, it needed to be a monster, something murderous and supernatural," so it isn't his fault she doesn't want him, because she's not herself. He misses the idea of Anna, and Anna his wife no longer exists.

This is a husband obsessed with categorizing his wife, defining her, questioning and labeling her, constantly comparing her to things in order to contextualize her so she fits in an image he can understand. He's always saying "You're like this," or "you're like that," while witnessing her experiencing truly traumatic events. When he is verbally attacking her in the kitchen and she impulsively cuts her throat with the electric blade, he patches her up and tries to understand her experience by cutting himself with it. Safely. On the arm. Through his shirt. He doesn't get it. He's never gonna get it.

This is all after an extremely tense sequence in which Anna is trying prepare lunch in a kitchen the size of a postage stamp while he's harassing her for information about her life without him in it. The claustrophobia of living in a tiny space with someone who doesn't love you anymore.

Anna's submissive soft doppelganger arrives in form of their kid's teacher, and Mark sees in her his ideal version of Anna. He is seeing a version of Anna who loves him for who he is and immediately cleans up after him and sleeps with him. The only problem is that the kid cries in his sleep whenever she's around. Its almost as if.... he knows she's not his mother and even though she's nice and she takes care of him, it's not enough. (He has his mother in him.)

This is significant because in the first initial discussion that Mark and Anna have regarding her leaving him, he says he won't visit their kid because he doesn't "want to fuck him up any further by being a Sunday Daddy." He's so ready to abandon this kid, whether or not he just said that to be hurtful, he is not admitting to himself that his one true love is his job, spy work. Which he immediately jumps right into when he suspects there is something more to his wife's motives for leaving him.

Mark sees Anna as a possession, he sees their son as a possession. And that's on the western idea of the nuclear family. He is indoctrinated to this, even though it doesn't suit him or Anna. Every measure he takes to "save his family" is performative.

Heinrich is helpful in providing the tape where Anna is abusive towards the young ballet dancer, and says the iconic phrase: "That's why I'm with you. You say I for me. You say I for me." She has been wanting a dominant man to push her out of her comfort zone, so she could be absolved of her guilt in seeking an exit feom her comfortable cookie cutter life.

It's in this same tape that we see her theorizing on the idea of two sisters, Faith and Chance. Faith cannot exist without Chance, and Chance cannot explain faith.

Now comes the scene in the church where she's quivering and whimpering before Christ, so there's an idea that she's received absolution and once that happens, once shes absolved of her guilt, her body literally expels it, horrifically and erotically. The intense, gripping, graphically staged miscarriage scene in the subway is a flashback, told by Anna. She says when she miscarried Faith, she kept it, needed to take care of it. A literal manifestation of her guilt and her grief over the life she thought she wanted and the person she thought she was.

Every time we see the creature, it is more human. From a mass of egg yolks, blood and pus oozing from under her skirt to a slippery octobaby, to a man sized mass of tentacles, turned Lovecraftian humanoid fuck-creature, every bit of attention Anna gives it empowers it to evolve. Which it eventually does, after much fucking and sucking, into a doppelganger of Mark, to his surprise.

Since this entire thing has been through the eyes of Mark, it feels like he's realizing that maybe he wasn't the ideal husband in her eyes either.

The graphic deaths that follow, while they feel almost too easy, lead me to the idea that both Anna and Mark have to experience the death of their former selves in order to move forward at all. But it doesn't matter, because Mark, for the sake of trying to repair his nuclear family unit, turned down the job that would have saved the world from total nuclear holocaust.

The bombs drop as our doppelgangers stand on opposite sides of a translucent door, about to meet one another for the first time as Mark and Anna's son hides in a bathtub screaming "Don't let him in, don't let him in!"

Nothing matters. Everyone dies. It's bleak. Yet this film is a MUCH healthier way of artistically exploring a failed marriage than, say, when Cronenberg made The Brood or when Lynch made Eraserhead.