Video Nasty July - Possession (1981) and the damage done
does our subject still wear pink socks?
Sorry I'm late, I stared too deeply into Isabelle Adjani’s eyes again.
Some spoilers for Possession (I will try my best to not tell you too much because I highly recommend you watch this movie - also this is day two/three of me trying to write this issue and I am no longer able to promise you this makes complete sense, just see it as a freeform musing ) - and trigger warnings because oh boy does this one get intense (gore, domestic violence, miscarriages).
Read the previous entries in this mini series here: Part 1 - a quick and dirty introduction, Part 2 - The Driller Killer and the start of the Video Nasty panic, Part 3 - Profondo Rosso and the kinds of movies targeted by the DPP list and Part 4 - Close To the Bone (a personal anecdote on the Video Nasty controversy).
Possession (1981)
Directed by: Andrzej Żuławski
Starring: Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani, Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent et al
Running time: 124 minutes
Original release: 25 May 1981 (Cannes premiere), 27 May 1981 (general release in France)
the plot… i guess?
West Berlin. Returning home from a nebulous espionage mission, spy Mark (Sam Neill) is shocked to find his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) wants to divorce him. She will not divulge the reason, but insists it is not because she has found someone else.
Indeed, between Anna's increasingly erratic, disturbing behaviour and his own spiraling mind, Mark discovers that the truth is a lot more complicated. And has a lot more tentacles.
an exercise in futility
I hope that by now you'll have glommed on to my point: that the video nasty panic was in fact fucking stupid. Right wing scaremongering (under the guise of “concern”), fueled by a Helen Lovejoy type figure (Mary Whitehouse was a SEX EDUCATION TEACHER - can you bloody imagine??), a right wing media frenzy and a desire to deflect blame of social unrest as far away from the actual culprits (the Thatcherite government) as possible . There is much to take in, and we haven’t even gotten to talking about the then-director of the BBFC, James Ferman. Per Wikipedia:
(Ferman) oversaw extensive liberalization of censorship standards and fronted a successful campaign for the Home Office to prohibit common law private prosecutions against films, which were being used extensively during the 1970s. In the late 1980s he faced criticism by some media outlets who accused him of allowing videos to pass which they blamed for real-life violence.
This led him to take caution over violent and sexually violent works, but his continued liberalization led to an anti-BBFC campaign run by the Daily Mail. He later faced criticism for refusing to allow several films from the 1970s to be released following the introduction of video censorship under the Video Recordings Act 1984 and the media outcry over "video nasties" (a collection of low-budget horror and exploitation films, often containing violence against women and said to be too violent and gory for UK release).
It is exhausting to even think about how all of this managed to happen, but at the same time, it sadly makes a lot of sense - because this is British politics in a nutshell.
We’ve already talked about how, among a slew of European (mainly Italian, with a sprinkle of Spanish) horror movies, the list named a significant amount of bonafide genre classics: The Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, Friday the 13th parts one and two, Phantasm, Scanners and The Thing all came a-cropper to the three pronged pitchfork that was the DPP list. But there was one title that genuinely stood out, one whose inclusion left me scratching my head in confusion.
Dear readership of THTH, I ask this of you: what’s the deal with Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession? And how did a Palme d’Or nominee end up on section three of the DPP list?
because you say “i” for me
Because of its inclusion on the DPP list, the film found itself banned in the UK (after an initial limited release) and the US. It eventually did get a US release, but a drastically cut one - an 81 minute cut (from the original 124 minutes) was released on the eve of Halloween 1983.
The cut stripped out the psychological horror of Anna and Mark’s disintegrating marriage, leaving only the body horror and rendering it pretty much incoherent. American critics tore strips off of this version of Possession, branding it an example of cheap Grand Guignol, and the film had no public success. Couple that with it being banned in the UK, meaning it couldn’t earn anything at the box office because you weren’t legally allowed to play it, and what you ended up with was a financial disappointment and a heap of heartbreak.
for the first time, you look vulgar to me
The film begins as Mark (Neill, splendidly accented and acting at a knife-edge) returns home from… a spy thing. It is not clarified exactly what that spy thing is, but we are to gather that it was quite tense and secretive (to the point where he has apparently told his son he was off to see the polar bears).
Right away, Żuławski strikes a gorgeously queasy balance between dynamic and static camera work, framing Mark’s reunion with Anna (Adjani) in the kind of geometric symmetry that would make Yorgos Lanthimos kick his little feet in excitement (and to his credit, he doesn’t then bring us a scene in which Anna explicitly asks Mark for a divorce - it’s very clear that he has already been told, and in his confusion he puts his suitcases down only to pick them back up and put them back down again).
We don’t get much context for what their relationship was like before Mark went off, but there are hints; in another beautifully framed scene, the couple try to hash out the details of their imminent separation while seated in a way that makes it look like one of them is about to ask the other for the briefcase with the dossier.
The discussion goes from… well, not 0, let’s say a sensible 74 to 100 pretty quickly - Mark dismisses the idea of being a “weekend dad” to their son Bob (teeny tiny Bob, poor Bob, angelic Bob) as he doesn’t want him to get “more fucked up” by being a “Sunday daddy”. Anna is shocked and appalled, Mark is a vat of rage waiting to explode, and when Anna stands up to leave she delivers a parting shot that properly lights the fuse (I should note that 1 - there are a number of other customers in this restaurant and 2 - this discussion is happening VERY LOUDLY).
Mark fully explodes, chasing Anna through the restaurant and trashing it in the process. Żuławski trusts you enough to fill in the gaps - perhaps this relationship was already not in the greatest state before Mark left. Perhaps this was only a matter of time. Anna asks Mark “do all couples go through this?” and you wonder what her life was like before Mark, before being the wife of someone who is neither around nor easily reachable while he isn’t.
Anna is adamant that she has not found someone else, but this claim seems to waver quickly - when Mark calls her friend Margit (played by Margit Carstensen) (incidentally, Margit fucking hates Mark) she is quick to divulge that Anna does have a lover. We’re introduced to Heinrich (Bennent), a man who talks like he’s just returned from a belated gap year, walks around in a perpetual dope haze, occasionally doing moves which can only be described as Bob’s Burgers style Sexy Dance Fighting and also has an aversion to the top two buttons of his shirt being up. If you’re going into the film without knowing the full extent of how batshit it gets, Heinrich’s introduction (and that of Heinrich’s weird mum-with-no-boundaries, whose house he openly uses as a shag pad) seems to put the film on a straight-forward path, even between Anna’s increasingly erratic behaviour and the mounting violence she and Mark wreak upon each other (on a personal note, the scene with the kitchen fight and the electric carving knife did hit a very particular nerve with me that I don’t really wish to dive into, just know that IT HIT).
But the full truth, as I mentioned, is far from simple.
bleed for a while
It’s difficult to describe this movie because it doesn’t necessarily follow a plot - to borrow a phrase from novelist and podcaster Caroline O’Donoghue, it’s very a play. Much like Hellraiser after it (also a movie in which a woman tends to a kind of monster in the attic), it is a domestic drama (albeit one in which both leads spiral into a complete physical and mental insanity) which is punctuated by moments of terrifying body horror before descending into a surreal, Body Snatchers-esque nightmare between two people who both love and also fucking hate each other, like 1989’s excellent The War of the Roses , but on crack.
In a very real way, it is a gift to someone like me who loves storytelling because it tells you two stories in one - that playing out on screen between Anna and Mark, and that of its filmmaker having a protracted depressive episode. Żuławski quite famously wrote Possession in the wake of a painful and messy divorce from actress Małgorzata Braunek, and every pore of the film exudes the particular pain that only that kind of break can bring forward. I could argue that there is a third story at play, given that the film is quite deliberately set in 1980s West Berlin - the Wall is a prominent figure, always looming in the background, framing rained out and freakishly empty streets.
The films most famous scene, one that is still influencing filmmakers (just this year, it was lovingly paid homage to in The First Omen), sees Anna (in flashback) experience a violent, possibly supernatural miscarriage/seizure in the subway. In an already intense movie, it stands out as its most intense scene. Shooting the scene, and the film as a whole, exhausted Adjani mentally and physically. There were rumours that she attempted suicide when filming completed, something which was seemingly confirmed by Żuławski in an interview some years later.
Żuławski said about the scene:
There were two takes. This scene was filmed at five in the morning, when the subway was closed. I knew it was worth a lot of effort for [Adjani], both emotionally and physically, because it was cold there. It was unthinkable to repeat this scene endlessly. Most of what's left on the screen is the first take. The second take was made as a safety net, as is customary when shooting difficult scenes, for example, in case the laboratory spoils the material.
Adjani makes the scene mesmerizing - it’s almost painful to watch her go through what she’s experiencing, and while we are never given a full explanation for what it was exactly that happened to her, we don’t really need one. It is a scene that fully embodies “horror as the ultimate cinema of the senses” - as Anna screams and shakes and cries and writhes, blood and and milky fluids oozing from her, you almost want to laugh for want of anything to break the tension that builds in your body watching her.
the story concludes (for now)
While on a surface level I understand Possession’s inclusion on the DPP list - because, most likely, a surface level is the level on which the DPP read the movie like pretty much all of the other movies on the list - my heart aches for Żuławski because this film’s inclusion on the list seems especially cruel given the immediate fate of it. I am thankful for the cultural rediscovery and re-evaluation that made it into what it deserved to be all along: a classic, a true sensory experience, difficult to define but rewarding to sit with.
You may key into this movie in an entirely different way than I did. And that’s brilliant. That’s glorious, that’s a testament of the power of storytelling.
And no amount of campaigning from any rightwing blowhard can take that away.
For more on Possession:
The Complicated Truth Behind “Video Nasty” Possession’s Ban - Collider
The Catharsis of Possession - Girls On Tops
The Evolution of Horror - Mind & Body part 9: Possession
That marks the end of Video Nasty July… but we will return to the era very soon, through the lens of a movie which takes the era as its setting.
But first! We’re going to party like it’s 1999 because for the whole of August we’re looking at what happened in the world of horror movies in the much praised “best year for movies”. Did that statement count for horror movies? Can we work out a more holistic approach to an answer than just saying “well yes, fucking Blair Witch Project came out this year”? Stay tuned.
And say I for me.
Hi, a really interesting analysis of the film. In my essay on it I paired it with David Cronenberg's The Brood and got a lot more into the gynaecological horror of it - monstrous birth and so on
https://open.substack.com/pub/backtobackmovies/p/back-to-back-25-mummies-dont-hurt