Seeing as next year marks the 40th anniversary of William Friedkin's horror masterpiece, I couldn't help keeping score against Hollywood's latest release, "The Possession," which is currently No. 1 at the box office after a strong Labor Day weekend. Ideally, each movie should be judged on its own merits, but my mind couldn't help running a side-by-side comparison every step of the way.Based on his own best-selling novel, William Peter Blatty adapted "The Exorcist" into an Oscar-winning screenplay. It tells the tale of Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), the 12-year-old daughter of a single mother and Hollywood actress, Chris (Ellen Burstyn), who lives in Georgetown while working on her next project. After a series of unexplainable events and violent outbursts by her daughter, who claims to be The Devil, Chris realizes that doctors cannot help her. She turns to two priests, Father Damian Karras (Jason Miller), a spiritually conflicted man who's guilt-ridden over his ailing mother, and Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), a world- traveling exorcist and the one man who can drive out the demon.
"The Possession" follows a similar plot of a possessed little girl from a broken home. Em (Natasha Calis) and her sister Hannah (Madison Davenport) are grappling with the divorce of their parents, Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick). They move with their father into a developing suburban community, where Em visits a yard sale and finds a mysterious box with ancient Hebrew carvings. Her odd obsession with the box turns into full-on possession by a child-feasting demon from Jewish lore, forcing Clyde to seek out a Rabbi to perform an exorcism. The script, co-written by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, is supposedly based on a true story chronicled in the Los Angeles Times about a "dybbuk box" purchased on eBay. I don't mind that the script takes liberties with the actual events. I mind that it unfolds rather predictably, following a "cookie cutter" formula. While it sets up a fascinating family dynamic of distrust and divorce in the first half, it loses sight of it down the stretch. Em's sister, Hannah, practically disappears mid-way through the film, when the exact opposite would have been more fascinating. A girl's reaction to her possessed sister would have provided a fresh take on the genre.Rather than keeping the possession isolated to a single girl or single family, we see various people killed by the box -- teachers, neighbors, and an opening murder that pales in comparison to "Scream" (1996). The outside murders pull focus from the main story, and their instant deaths feel inconsistent with Em's slow possession. The writers had the right instinct to play up the family dynamic, but they should have left it there, leaving the skeptical outside world to doubt the supernatural elements. "Us against the world" is much scarier. Hopefully Snowden and White remember this in their upcoming (sigh) remake of "Poltergeist" (1982).
If you want a few scares on a Friday date night, go for it. But if you want a memorable movie experience, this one's not turning any heads.
"The Exorcist"
★ ★ ★★
"The Possession"
★ ★
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