A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel (22 page)

I screamed and screamed and screamed until I finally heard her land behind me.

Yeah, it’s just a BLOG! (How retro!) Or is THE LAST FINAL GIRL the greatest blog ever!?!? Exploring all things horror and horrific. Books! Comics! Video games! TV! Movies!
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From the gooey gory midnight show cheese to the highfalutin art-house highbrow. Beware of spoilers. I WILL SPOIL YOU!!!!!

BIO:
Karen Brissette

Friday, November, 18, 20 _ _

The Possession
, Fifteen Years Later: Final Episode

I know, I know, you were worried after watching the “clip show” episodes four and five that
The Possession
was running out of steam. Hey, I don’t blame you and I don’t judge you. I mean, we can only watch and break down the
same interview so many times. And the Norwegian exorcisms and the-Pope-performing-street-exorcism clips get old. We get it: the Pope swings a big cross, yeah?

But if we haven’t learned anything else, we’ve learned this: Trust the awesomeness and audacity of a show that works in found footage shot by the eight-year-old sister!

Instead of the usual opening credits, the final episode opens with the camera’s POV run through the house that starts in the basement. It’s a brilliant choice to forgo the show’s usual over-the-top hype and hysteria. The tour of the house is incredibly effective and creepy. There is no voice-over, no narrative, no soundtrack. We only occasionally hear the footsteps of the cameraperson and whispers of prayer and conversation elsewhere in the house. We know the lingering shots of dark, empty rooms will eventually dissolve or descend into the chaos of the exorcism, and we can’t bear the tension and we can’t wait for it to be broken.

After a slow pan of the basement, we walk up the stairs, the camera goes dark before we get to the door, and then we’re in the living room. Wait, what? Yeah, they’re fucking with us. But we love it. You can’t get to the living room from the basement. Can you? Isn’t the basement door in the dining room? And the dining room is just off the . . . Hmm. Let’s stop and think about it. (
Karen stops and scratches her head thoughtfully. *scritch scratch scritch*
)

There are very few transitional scene-setting sequences in
The Possession
. Unlike run-of-the-mill TV cop shows (the forever-running
Law and Order
was the most notorious in continuously implementing the walk-and-talk scene), where people walk to and from crime scenes, into apartment rooms and hallways, buildings, parks, boxing gyms (always a boxing gym somewhere in a cop show), and the like, and while
walkin’ struttin’
ambulating,
the characters have important, quasi-ludicrous, we’d-never-talk-about-this-shit-out-in-the-public conversations relating to the plot. Those cop shows decided it would be too boring to have their cops standing around the same place (or sitting in their car) yakking, so we got a tour of their interior and exterior locations instead.

Contrast to how we’ve been presented the Barrett House: The only hallway in the Barrett House we’ve ever seen is the upstairs hallway and that hallway seems to have more doors than bedrooms that we’ve been in. I mean, there’s Sarah and John’s room, Marjorie’s, and Merry’s, but isn’t there a door between the parents’ bedroom and the sunroom? Or is it on the other side, adjacent to the sunroom and the hallway banister? Does that go to some attic we haven’t seen? How about the first floor? Sure we’ve seen the living room and the front foyer, but where is the kitchen exactly from there? And isn’t there a dining room mashed in there somewhere? Is there a separate dining room or is that a section of the living room area, to the right of the TV, or is that just more living room? There’s a half-bathroom down there somewhere too, we think. Wait, where’s the basement door again? Kitchen? We the viewers aren’t sure. We’ve never seen it. In fact, the only door that has ever really been the subject of their camera’s deep, intense focus is the door to Marjorie’s bedroom, and there, it’s an overexposure; the camera has been too focused, too close, so her door fills the screen and shows nothing else but door. A closed door.

The Possession
simply doesn’t show you open doors; those entrances and exits. We only get to see closed-off rooms. It’s like we’re watching actors in a series of Sartre’s
No Exit
being performed over and over again in the compartmentalized spaces inside the house. The Barrett family is in the house, but at the same time,
they’re nowhere. We’re not allowed to see or dwell on the connections between one room and another inside the house, so there’s never any hope of an escape for Marjorie or the Barrett family. And we the viewers watch from this eerily liminal vantage point. I mean, we’re there with them but not really there. We watch from the spaces between their spaces, and that’s always where the monster dwells. Dwells, I say!!!

SCARRRRYYYY! I mean, damn, so here we are in the opening minutes of the final episode and we discover that we actually know jack and shit about the house’s layout and ARRGGGH, OUR HEADSSSS ARE EXPLODINGGGGG!

Anyway, it was during the final episode’s whacked-out tour of the house that it hit me like a ton of Emily Brontë novels.
The Possession
fits neatly into the Gothic tradition, starting with the Barrett House itself. The house is a maze, a labyrinth. We can’t know its map because it doesn’t have one. The Barrett House (not the real one, but the one as presented in the TV show; I want to make this distinction as clear as possible) is as mysterious and foreboding as the castles of
The Castle of Otranto
and
Wuthering Heights
. The Barrett House is as dark and as confusing as
The Shining
’s Overlook Hotel (check out the Escher-esque map of the hotel in the insanely fun
Room 237
), or Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, or the ever-expanding house of Mark Danieleweski’s
House of Leaves
. The Barrett House is an important character of
The Possession
and it tells us secrets as well, if we pay attention. For example, the house tour ends with a rough jump cut from the kitchen to the sunroom. We know the sunroom was converted to be the confessional room. In case we forgot, the camera crawls along the black-cloth-covered windows, the confessional camera perched on its tripod, and lighting lamps. We hear prayers and responses echoing from what we presume to be Marjorie’s bedroom, and the camera then pans across the sunroom and focuses on the weathered (can I say
wuthered
without you all smashing your computer screams over my pun? can I please?) yellow wallpaper. The lens goes out of focus purposefully, so that the yellow wallpaper fuzzes outward like an exploding sun. Marjorie screams, the camera sharply refocuses, and
The Possession
title credits bleed out of the yellow paper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the greatest feminist gothic/horror short stories ever written. In the story . . . wait for it . . . an oppressed young woman goes cray-cray nuts! Or does she??? After having a kid, her husband relocates her to a creeptastic mansion for the summer. Her misogynistic and controlling husband/physician John (yes, John!) prescribes his “rest cure” for her “nervous condition” and “slight hysterical tendency.” She is forbidden to work, forbidden to do anything really, even think for herself (the dude doesn’t even want her writing in her journal because she’s too fragile and pretty to be, you know, thinking for herself). She’s confined to an old creeptastic nursery that’s plastered with funky yellow wallpaper. The young woman slowly goes insane, thinking that she sees a woman on all fours creeping in the background of the wallpaper, and eventually decides she’s got to set ms. creepy-crawly free. At the end of the story the young woman endlessly circles the room, tearing off strips of wallpaper and crawling over the (dead? god, I hope he’s dead) body of her husband.

Is the Barrett House telling us that our own diabolically challenged and/or mentally-ill Marjorie is the young woman trapped in the room with the wallpaper, or the metaphorical oppressed woman in the yellow wallpaper who yearns to be free? You decide!

After the opening, we’re in the quiet living room. Another brilliant decision made by the show’s producers was to forgo the show’s narrator for the episode’s entirety and let the action and audio unfold before us without introduction or interpretation. Cinema verité, reality-show style! In the
living room, and all holding hands and quietly praying are John Barrett, Father Wanderly, and young Father Gavin.

(aside 1: Father Gavin is making his first appearance on the screen, and they might as well have given him the tunic equivalent of a
Star Trek
red shirt to wear. It’s so obvious that he’s only there to be
the sacrificial lamb
going down, and going down hard.)

The scene fades to black and flashbacks to
earlier
. We know it’s earlier because they tell us in big, white letters. The letters fade into bright sunshine and we see John wading into a sea of protesters gathered out in front of the Barrett House. The extra-special-douche-bag-Baptist-protesters-who-shall-not-be-named are holding up signs. Most of the signs are blurred out, but the ones we can read are “God Hates Marjorie” signs. John tears down those signs and punches one of the blurred-out faces of the protesters. John is taken to the ground by the police. While we root for him, his flipped switch (into manic violence setting) is more than a little scary, and we see this, his fall from grace, in slow motion. Next, we cut to a scene in the kitchen. The Barrett family quietly finishing a meal of Chinese food.
Mmmm . . . Chinese food . . .
John says quietly, “I want to talk to her again about what’s going to happen and I want Father Wanderly’s help.” Sarah explodes, yelling, “Merry can come upstairs with us if she wants!” The scene jumps to John standing in front of the camera, begging the cameraperson to stop taping for a few seconds. The scene cuts abruptly to a black screen, then comes back to the kitchen, and John saying, “This isn’t going to work if we don’t believe.”

(aside 2: Now, I’m no editing expert [well, if you insist on referring to me as “Karen the expert of all things relating to horror and pop culture” I won’t stop you. I won’t even disagree with you!], but it’s clear this kitchen scene is a shitty clip job, and that whatever conversation John and
Sarah actually had was smashed to bits and the pieces moved around.)

We get some interviews with the players, but nothing new or memorable being said. Sarah’s interview is only worthy of note because she’s so worn down. The circles under her eyes look like purple tea bags.

We’re eventually brought into Marjorie’s empty bedroom and shown how creepy they’ve made it look with the white cloth on the desk, statues, candelabras, a giant pewter cross, and straps on the bed. We get a shot of a crew member holding a digital thermometer. He holds it to the camera: 59 in big green letters. He tells us that the temperature has dropped ten degrees since they’ve been in the room. The crewman looks nervous and we’re supposed to believe that evil has cranked up the AC.

Okay, kids. After all the blog posts and tens of thousands of words of Karen’s wisdom, we’re finally here: Marjorie enters the bedroom to begin the rite of exorcism. Continuing with the smartly subdued theme of this final episode,
The Possession
doesn’t endlessly tease us with false entrances or reenactments of reenactments, and they don’t dress it up with church choruses chorusing or violins screeching minor chords. Marjorie simply walks into her bedroom and leads in the oddly weddinglike procession of her family and the two priests.

Though I’m tempted, I’m not going to give a frame-by-frame breakdown of the entire exorcism rite, which times out at thirty-two minutes and sixteen seconds of footage. I mean, I could write a book on those thirty-two-plus minutes, but I won’t, at least not here. I’ll just hit some of the highlights that you craven blog readers may or may not have missed. I’ve watched this episode going on forty times, so, yeah, I’ve got the deets down.

—After a brief argument with Father Wanderly, Mom Barrett ties her daughter down to the bed as everyone else in the room watches. Can you say awkward? Uncomfortable? So fucked up on so many levels? BUT WAIT A GODDAMN MINUTE!!! Rewatch the scene closely. Go ahead, I’ll wait. (*Karen taps her feet*) Back, yeah? RIGHT! We only see Mom Barrett’s back as she supposedly places Marjorie’s wrists and ankles in the happy-fun-time-what’s-the-safety-word restraints. I mean, holy jeebus, it’s an old and obvious stage-magician technique. Keep your back to the audience/camera and us saps and suckers will believe Marjorie is tied down solely by the context of the scene. It (almost) works because it’s so bald-faced in its obviousness. We see close-ups of just about everything else in the room at some point during the exorcism scene, but the camera never zooms in on Marjorie’s bound wrists or feet. A full twenty-seven minutes passes before a bloody Marjorie gets up off her bed with the restraints magically melted away. By then, the chomp-a-priest scene has our heads spinning (see what I did there?) so we’re panicked and thinking
Oh yeah, right, Mom tied her down a long time ago and OMG, THE DEVIL SET HER FREEEEEEE!!!!!
And I bet some of us watching even falsely remember seeing Sarah tying Marjorie’s wrists down. I know I did at first. The clever show monkeys let us fill in those details because they knew if we were distracted enough by all the other craziness, we would.
It would’ve worked too if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.
Ah, but we’re too smart for them. Maybe. Anyway, what we might’ve subconsciously or initially suspected on the first viewing is all there on the video: Sarah Barrett never tied down her daughter. She only pretended to, and Marjorie played along.