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I followed a link to to what turned out to be a review of The Quiet Ones with the headline Aren't You Sick of Possession Movies That Always Look Like This? While it seemed an even-handed review of the movie, so far as I can tell without having seen it, I'm more interested in thinking about how possession movies might be done differently; but find myself mostly recalling ghost stories.
Fullcircle, by John Buchan, and A Wicked Voice, by Vernon Lee -- do treat possession in a more subtle way -- perhaps because ghosts are different from demons. Both have stories in which someone's personal tastes are insidiously manipulated from what they were; both have the problem that the change does not necessarily seem all that bad -- in Fullcircle, the people who move into the old house first become more sociable and less hippy-granola-ish, and then, o horror, they convert to Catholicism. In A Wicked Voice, the narrator is compelled the spirit of a castrato to compose Italianate neo-Baroque operas instead of the grim Wagnerian-inspired stuff that he wants to do; and is even more appalled that audiences are fool enough to like them (if he were living in our century, he'd probably use the term "sheeple.") Subtle possession is a good trope that can easily be done in by values dissonance.
Lately I've come across the reverse -- a cache of transformation-themed fetish stories that can mostly be summed up as "in which I become the man of my dreams." I call these the reverse because they're clearly meant as wish-fulfillment even though the situations would be horror to anyone who didn't have that specific kink (admittedly, that's pretty much the definition of kink). The one that I rather liked, The Top Hat, was also the closest to the type of possession stories described above: a man buys a pre-WWI hat and finds himself, over the following weeks and months, physically coming to resemble the Teddy-Roosevelt-esque gent who originally owned it (imagine The Case of Charles Dexter Ward if it were gay bear kink with a happy time-paradox ending).
Fullcircle, by John Buchan, and A Wicked Voice, by Vernon Lee -- do treat possession in a more subtle way -- perhaps because ghosts are different from demons. Both have stories in which someone's personal tastes are insidiously manipulated from what they were; both have the problem that the change does not necessarily seem all that bad -- in Fullcircle, the people who move into the old house first become more sociable and less hippy-granola-ish, and then, o horror, they convert to Catholicism. In A Wicked Voice, the narrator is compelled the spirit of a castrato to compose Italianate neo-Baroque operas instead of the grim Wagnerian-inspired stuff that he wants to do; and is even more appalled that audiences are fool enough to like them (if he were living in our century, he'd probably use the term "sheeple.") Subtle possession is a good trope that can easily be done in by values dissonance.
Lately I've come across the reverse -- a cache of transformation-themed fetish stories that can mostly be summed up as "in which I become the man of my dreams." I call these the reverse because they're clearly meant as wish-fulfillment even though the situations would be horror to anyone who didn't have that specific kink (admittedly, that's pretty much the definition of kink). The one that I rather liked, The Top Hat, was also the closest to the type of possession stories described above: a man buys a pre-WWI hat and finds himself, over the following weeks and months, physically coming to resemble the Teddy-Roosevelt-esque gent who originally owned it (imagine The Case of Charles Dexter Ward if it were gay bear kink with a happy time-paradox ending).
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Date: 2014-04-26 01:43 am (UTC)From:Find someone who has never seen, nor even heard of, Regarding Henry.
Rent it and invite this person over to watch the subtlest movie about possession ever filmed, and say you haven't seen it.
As the guest watches the movie, you watch the guest.
...Am I a bad person?
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Date: 2014-04-26 04:12 am (UTC)From:"This one is *really* good. Most of these things are really ham-fisted but this one reminds me of being addicted to cigarettes. I keep on promising myself that I won't keep on betraying humanity but I look away for a second and "Oops!" I've done it again. I get to display a lot of initiative too. It didn't think that you were complex enough to be a problem but I insisted that you were going to end up being the major obstacle here: hence your presence in this trap."
"Not *complex* enough!"
"I know: clueless upper management. Isn't it always that way? At least this one delegates responsibility properly. Speaking of which: good-bye Doctor." [Pulls trigger on blaster. Cut to next chapter.]
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Date: 2014-04-26 01:06 pm (UTC)From: