One of Horror’s Most Underseen and Unsettling Experiences Is Now Streaming on Shudder

In the age of streaming, no matter how acclaimed or beloved a movie or TV show might be, unless you can easily pull it up on your platform of choice, audiences are known to completely overlook it. Additionally, even if an older film earned a release, more obscure titles don’t necessarily make it to DVD, thus making it more unlikely to be upgraded to HD formats, or even modern households having Blu-ray players capable of watching such films in the event that a viewer takes the time to track down a copy. Luckily, thanks to the passionate horror fans at Shudder, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession is just a click away from any subscriber, unleashing a world of inhuman ecstasy on modern audiences.

On its surface, Possession is a relatively unexceptional film for a horror fan, as it focuses on Mark (Sam Neill), a spy who returns home to his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and young son Bob (Michael Hogben) and finds that their relationship has all but disintegrated. Mark hires an investigator to follow Anna and discovers that part of their marriage’s dissolution is due to another relationship she has developed. However, the nature of that relationship is what fully plunges audiences into an entirely unhinged realm, the likes of which almost defy description.

To fully detail what makes Possession such an unrelenting and nightmarish experience would deny a viewer the joys (and terrors) of witnessing them for themselves, but it’s an experience that needs to be seen to be believed. After the film’s initial release in Europe in the early ’80s, it was deemed one of the “video nasties” and all but cut from circulation, with the version of the film that eventually made its way to the United States being trimmed down to a mere 81 minutes.  With the original cut being more than two hours, the version of the film available to audiences for years was eviscerated to be an embarrassing adaptation of its fully glories. It wasn’t until 2000 that an uncut version of the film was released on VHS and DVD, though it took another decade for the film to get an uncensored HD release, which is what audiences have been relying on tracking down for years.

Żuławski notoriously developed the project when he was going through his own mental struggles, largely based on his own divorce. For a large chunk of the film’s first hour, it’s less an abject horror movie and focused far more on the emotional fallout of the destruction of a formerly loving relationship. Mark and Anna both have a devotion to one another and to Bob, but it’s clear that the passion they have for one another is becoming less about love and more about anger and resentment, manifested in multiple abjectly grating scenes of domestic turmoil and shouting matches. As if this isn’t anxiety-inducing enough, further into the film, Żuławski channels nightmarish imagery to take the tension to an entirely new realm, the likes of which are hard to be put into words and have yet to be topped in the genre in the 40 years since the film’s release. These interpersonal conflicts, as well as the existential dread and viscerally unsettling imagery, come to a crescendo that scholars are still attempting to interpret.

Possession is not a film for everyone, as it lives in the outskirts of genre storytelling and is about as far from the straightforward horrors from the ’80s as you can get. The film instead is more comparable to the likes of Stanley Kubrick by way of H.R. Giger and H.P. Lovecraft, yet also feels just as contemporary and modern as the metaphorical horrors being released, akin to Hereditary. More than four decades after its release, not only is Possession available to be witnessed in all of its uncut glory, but also without requiring anything more than launching Shudder and having the will to click “play.” Regardless of whether you become a devout fanatic or are left repulsed, Possession leaves a life-changing mark on anyone brave enough to witness it.

What do you think of the film? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!