Dad worked to pin down the younger priest so Jenn—she’d abandoned her camera—could wrap the man’s bleeding arm in his billowy tunic sleeve. The sleeve quickly turned a dark red, almost purple. And I know it’s probably a faulty or cross-wired memory, but Dad was wild-eyed, his teeth bared; he wore the same expression he had before he assaulted the protester.
Marjorie slid as close as she could to the edge of her bed. Her mouth was red and full. She breathed in quickly through her nose, and I knew she was going to spit so I turned away. I didn’t want to see what came out. I heard a wet splat hit the hardwood floor, though, and my stomach flipped. When I looked up again, Marjorie sat up and hopped out of bed like the restraints were loose, weren’t tied, weren’t ever there.
She ran over to her desk and flipped up the end of the white sacramental cloth, which sent statues of Mary and a candelabra and its burning candles crashing to the floor. She yanked opened the stubbornly sentient desk drawer and sent it crashing to the floor, spilling the contents everywhere. She reached down and picked up something black and metallic that sort of looked like an opened-up stapler, but I didn’t get a great look at it. She held it over her head, waved it around, and screamed, “See? See? It was this! The drawer wasn’t me,” and then threw it at the window behind her. “Why would you do this to me? Did you put it there, Merry? Did they make you put it there when I wasn’t looking?” She wiped the back of her sleeve over her bloody mouth.
I screamed, “No! I didn’t do anything! I—” But I stopped and covered my own mouth. I saw the blood on her face and on her sweatshirt and I was afraid, so afraid that she would make good on her old promise to rip out my tongue. There, in that freezing meat locker of a room with its coppery, sweet smell of candle wax and blood, and with screams, groans, and breathless prayers echoing off the walls, all I could think was that my tongue and I were next, and that everyone was wrong about everything.
Mom was behind me, on the floor weeping, her knuckles white from her hands being clenched together so tightly. She said, “Marjorie, you promised. You promised no one would get hurt if Merry was here.”
The door opened behind us and an EMT rushed into the room and tended to Father Gavin.
Marjorie said, “No I didn’t. That’s not what I said. Check the tape.” Her voice sounded funny, like all her teeth had gone all loose and wiggly so the words slipped and fell out between them.
Dad leapt past the EMT, Jenn, and Father Wanderly as they slowly helped Father Gavin shuffle away from Marjorie and to the side of the room. Dad wrapped his arms around Marjorie’s waist. Marjorie pulled the desk drawer off the floor and hit him in the head with it. Dad let go and fell away.
Marjorie looked at me and said, “I said someone would get hurt bad if Merry wasn’t here. But I never said what would happen if she was here. In fact, I thought I already told you all that everyone was going to die.”
I yelled, “Stop it, you faker! You told me you were faking! You liar! I hate you! I hate you so much! I wish you were dead.”
I turned to run and bumped into Barry. He didn’t try to stop me. I pushed him out of the way, opened the door, and ran out. The heat in the hallway was dizzying and my glasses fogged up instantly so I couldn’t see where I was going. I took them off and stuffed them into my pocket. Behind me, in Marjorie’s room, there was more yelling and there were loud thumps and crashes like everything inside was imploding, falling apart.
Marjorie yelled after me, “Merry?” and it sounded like she was in the hallway right behind me.
I didn’t turn around. I took a hard right and ran down the stairs. I ran too fast, trying to jump two stairs at time and I tripped and twisted my ankle on the second landing and stumbled down to the next, crashing onto my hands and knees. I scrambled back onto my feet and limped down the last section of stairs to the front foyer.
Ken was there with Tony the cameraman. Tony’s camera was perched on his shoulder like a black bird and he dropped down to one knee so that he was down at my height and the lens pointed in my face. Ken wouldn’t look at me, so I wouldn’t look at him. I had a staring contest with the camera instead. I breathed through my nose and I didn’t blink.
Ken said, “Jesus . . .”
Tony slowly panned the camera up above my head. I turned around. Marjorie was on the staircase, just a few steps below the second floor, leaning on the banister railing.
She’d untied her hair and let it dangle in front of her face. She bobbed her head back and forth, swinging her dark hair like a clock’s pendulum. I could see her eyes. I remember seeing her eyes and seeing what they saw.
Mom and Dad yelled for Marjorie. They had to be out in the hallway, maybe a few steps behind her. Marjorie didn’t react to them. She calmly said to me, “Stay there, Merry. We’re almost done.”
Marjorie yelled, “Wait for me!” and jumped and pushed up and off the railing with her hands, as though she were playing leapfrog. Her hair bounced away from her face. Her mouth was open, so were her eyes, and I remember her there, over and beyond the railing, hanging in the air, in empty space, time frozen like a snapshot.
She was there and she’s been there in my mind ever since. There is in the air, past the railing, and above the foyer.
I turned around and covered my eyes with my cold hands. I was afraid to watch her fall, and I was afraid if I watched she wouldn’t fall, that she actually wasn’t falling.
I screamed and screamed and screamed until I finally heard her land behind me.
CHAPTER 23
THE LAST FINAL GIRL
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! High school! 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 thousand
s 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.
A Head Full of Ghosts Page 21