The Possession (2012)

The Possession (2012) 

It was a long hot summer, and there was not a horror film in sight—until The Possession appeared just before August ended. There was a drought on horror films all June, July, and nearly all of August of 2012. Many say that The Possession satisfied this unmet demand, to the point that this otherwise unremarkable film led box office sales for a few weeks.  

 The Possession revolves around a young girl who finds a “dybbuk box” at a yard sale. At her insistence, the girl’s divorced father buys the box, unaware of its contents. The daughter opens the box and becomes possessed by the disembodied spirit (“dybbuk”) that is housed inside. She begins to behave bizarrely, stabbing herself and others and wandering off, for no reason at all. Her parents’ divorce is implicated in this sudden shift.  

The parallel between the dybbuk box and Pandora’s box is obvious, but this association is secondary to the dybbuk’s deep roots in Jewish folkore, film, theatre, and mysticism. The theme is a throw back S. Ansky’s play from 1914. The dybbuk story became a favorite of Yiddish stage and cinema, eventually making its way into opera and puppetry. The last “official” Yiddish dybbuk film was made in Poland in 1937, shortly before Nazis invaded Poland and eventually exterminated most of Poland’s large Jewish population. 

The Dybbuk (1937)

Even though this film revolves around the Jewish mystical concept of the dybbuk, it’s impossible not to view the film as a rip-off of The Exorcist (1973), which shook spectators out of their seats in the mid-seventies, and made little Linda Blair (and green vomit) famous. Even those of us who relish the folkloric legacy of the Yiddish dybbuk can spot the commercialism at bay. So be it—movie makers “go with what they know,” and have to be more practical than mystical when it comes to investing money in movies. The Dybbuk may hold sentimental significance among certain circles, but the legacy of The Exorcist (and its many sequels and remakes) remains intact in Middle America.  

Matisyahu stars as the young Chasidic man who rises to the occasion to save the day—but loses his own life in the end (just as the psychiatrist-priest dies as The Exorcist ends).  Matisyahu is a neo-Chasidic rapper who holds heart throb status for many young traditional Jews. He wins kudos for his heroic role in exorcising the dybbuk from the daughter—after an MRI scan reveals shadows of a spirit inside her and after her father drives frantically to a Chasidic enclave in Brooklyn to consult with rabbinical experts.

It’s easy to understand why traditional Jews would buy tickets to see The Possession. But it took a much wider audience to make this film a commercial success, in spite of its cinematic shortcoming. I’m not convinced that the perseverance of hard-core horror film fans fully explains its impressive sales, either. Producer Sam Rami has his followers, for sure, but not enough to blast the box office.

Perhaps the plot also reflects current controversy about psychiatric treatments for young children. ADHD diagnoses among children are no longer news—but the increasing use of strong, and often unapproved, antipsychotic meds in pediatric patients has made the front pages in the last few years. I’m theorizing that this film about the bizarre behavior of a little girl—and the equally bizarre explanation for its sudden onset—may represent a hidden critique of child psychiatry, and the willingness to assign serious diagnoses to young children, and to prescribe multiple medications, before conducting a full explanation for other sources of distress.

In this film, the parents’ acrimonious divorce, and its spillover on their children, could explain their daughter’s odd behavior. Instead, a dybbuk is discovered, and an exorcism is performed, and serious side effects (the loss of Matisyahu’s life) ensue.  



The Possession poster recollects the moths & mouth
seen in the famed Silence of the Lambs poster.

Perhaps, on some level, viewers took this message to heart, and bought tickets for a second-rate horror that has first-class parallels with contemporary controversies. It would not be surprising if some parents are  as perplexed as the parents in The Possession, when their children behave strangely, and then receive even stranger diagnoses and more mysterious treatments. Updates to the APA's DSM-V (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual) will address these important issues.

To read more about the literary, filmic, and folkoric origins of The Dybbuk (1937), please refer to  Dr. Packer's Movies and the Modern Psyche (Praeger, 2007).

To read about recent debates about psychiatry, 
please see Cinema’s Sinister Psychiatrists (2012),
which references the summer 2011 issue of
NY Review of Books reviews and rebuttals.