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Casting an Influence
Apr. 25th, 2014 09:08 pmI 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).
