Demonic Possession – Bitch Flicks

Direct from Hell: ‘Paranormal Activity’ and the Demonic Gaze

Micah’s patriarchal control through the first half of the film is omnipresent as he mocks, coerces and films his girlfriend’s descent into possession. The second half of the film deals with the demon taking control of the film. Micah and Katie are too weak to properly deal with the situation and they lose sight of their safety. The audience see what the demon wants them to see; it is in control of not only Katie’s mind and body, but also what the audience is exposed to, creating an unstable and terrifying experience.

This guest post by Alexandra West appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity became a worldwide sensation and one of the most profitable films ever made. Shot in 2007 but not officially released until 2009, the independent film made its mark on filmgoers and helped popularize the found footage horror format which began with the likes of Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Blair Witch Project (1999). After filming was completed, director Oren Peli had it tour the festival circuit where it generated a fair amount of buzz. Universal acquired it and the film languished in development hell. There were talks of a full-on remake doing away with the found-footage aspect and turning it into a traditional narrative with celebrities starring. But it would be Steven Spielberg who saw the film while Universal and Dreamworks were figuring out what to do with it and he suggested leaving it as it was, but re-film the ending so that it was open-ended and sequel ready.

The film opens with a couple, Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston) who live together and are “engaged to be engaged”. Strange things have been happening in the house so Micah decides to take control over the situation and buy a camera to capture the events and determine the culprit. Katie invites a psychic over and tells him things like this have been happening to her since she was little. Things begin to escalate with the cameras capturing not only supernatural occurrences but also the deterioration of Micah and Katie’s relationship. Then the demon takes control.

In Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” she posited the idea of the “male gaze.” Looking closely at cinema from the 1930 through 1960s, Mulvey traces a pattern of fetishizing the female body, the camera examining and idolizing it which created an objectification of the body engendering the gaze as decidedly male. This creates the idea of woman as object rather than a human being with her own thoughts, concerns and motives. She is held captive by male desire. As Mulvey writes, “The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.” Mulvey’s essay was published in 1975 and has gone on to become a staple of film studies course and film criticism.

Paranormal Activity, for the first half, is completely submerged in the male gaze. Micah’s camera picks up what he wants to see and what he demands of his only consistent participant, Katie. As the film begins, the unexplained incidents–which are the catalyst for Micah purchasing the camera–are dispersed with the couple’s normal life; Katie is annoyed at Micah following her around and filming her, Micah goads Katie for sex and brags about it and in one instance, when Katie is in the washroom, she screams. Micah runs for the door, pauses, returns to get the camera, and then runs to check on Katie. Katie, having been scared by a large spider in this case, surmises that Micah went and got the camera before helping her. His need to capture all the events that pass that could explain away Katie’s fear is surpassing his instinct to actually help her.

The tone of the film begins to shift when Katie invites a psychic over to help. Katie says this isn’t the first time this has happened to her as she was visited by something as a child and she’s worried that it’s all happening again. Micah continually scoffs at the psychic, making it clear that he’s threatened by his girlfriend turning to someone else for help rather than him. The psychic agrees with Katie that something is going on and that it has been following Katie for all these year. He fears that it is demonic, meaning it wants to possess Katie. The psychic also warns that constant filming and playing with this entity is inviting it in, encouraging it to enter their world. He gives Katie the number of a demonologist and tells her to get in contact with him. While Katie feels she finally has answers, Micah convinces her that it’s nothing he can’t figure out. Katie agrees to forgo calling the demonologist for the time being.

Some of Paranormal Activity’s most iconic scenes are of the couple sleeping. Micah sets the camera on a tripod and the film shows us a time-lapse version of them sleeping. The first few nights reveal small occurrences such as the door to the bedroom moving slightly though no windows in the house are open. Micah pores over the footage, reveling in the fact that he’s onto something and catching it all on camera.

The film takes a stark turn. Katie is sleeping less and less, weakening her and putting a strain on her and Micah’s relationship. They decide to go out one night. Before they leave, Micah sets up a Ouija board to try and communicate with the entity. Katie walks in on him setting it up and angrily tells him that this is exactly what the psychic told them not to do. As she storms off, Micah follows, leaving the camera filming the Ouija board. The camera captures the Ouija board moving on its own and eventually bursting into flames which extinguish on their own. The events escalate with Katie being pulled out of bed by an unseen force and bite marks appearing on her back. Micah, determined to make things right, decides to get them out of the house though they have been told the demon will follow. Before they leave, Katie tells him that they should stay. Micah, frustrated, says fine, leaving the camera behind to catch an eerie grin on Katie’s face. On the final night Katie gets up from bed, goes downstairs and screams. Micah runs to help her and several loud thumps are heard. Katie returns to their bedroom, hurls Micah’s body at the camera crawling toward the camera and in the final moments of the film, her face morphs into something demon-like. The epilogue text states that Micah’s body was found a few days later and that Katie is still missing.

The gaze of the film is subverted from the first night they film themselves sleeping. It is the demon’s entrance into their lives. Though Katie says she experienced something similar as a child, Micah’s involvement causes it to grow worse. The film becomes terrifying because the audience knows Micah is no longer in control. As he says in the film, “I’ve been doing my research. I’m taking care of this. Nobody comes in my house, fucks with my girlfriend, and gets away with it.” Micah’s insistence on controlling the situation is precisely what allows it to escalate. Rather than heed the psychic’s warning, Katie trusts Micah and leaves herself open and vulnerable to the external entity. The film takes a decisive turn after the Ouija board scene. The demon has become more powerful and is wreaking havoc on their lives. No longer are we viewing this world through Micah’s male gaze, we are viewing it through a demonic gaze. The biggest similarity between Micah’s gaze and the demonic gaze is that Katie is the subject. She is either being followed by Micah’s camera or the demon. The only time she takes control of the narrative, first by getting Micah to stay in the house and then by killing him, is when she is possessed.

Mulvey posited that something radical must shift in film to escape the dominant male gaze toward a more equalized gaze. While the film industry’s awareness of the lack of complicated female characters, female directors, and writers is growing there is still work to be done. Paranormal Activity is a fascinating examination of this shift, though not ultimately a successful one. Micah’s patriarchal control through the first half of the film is omnipresent as he mocks, coerces and films his girlfriend’s descent into possession. The second half of the film deals with the demon taking control of the film. Micah and Katie are too weak to properly deal with the situation and they lose sight of their safety. The audience see what the demon wants them to see; it is in control of not only Katie’s mind and body, but also what the audience is exposed to, creating an unstable and terrifying experience.

Katie’s only real power comes when she is possessed. Because Micah isolated them, he has no one to protect him. Katie who ultimately kills him and throws his body into a camera knocking it over and creating a Dutch Angle within the film and skewing the look and feel of the night-vision sleeping arrangement that the audience has become so used to throughout the film, signalling the dawn of something new that we are perhaps not ready to see quite yet. Katie’s (or what used to be Katie) greatest act of defiance is escaping the camera view. In the final moment of the film, “Katie” lunges at the camera and it goes black before the final text appears. All the audience knows is that she is gone and has escaped the camera’s gaze. It is no longer able to monitor her.

Paranormal Activity achieved a shift by mocking Micah’s machismo. His comments and actions when he is control fail to protect either of them. Film fans recognize the trope in horror films of not heeding direct warnings, which leads characters to danger. Micah’s male gaze is so out of control that he convinces Katie to ignore the help they have been given until it is too late. His hyper-masculinity is so performative that the audience can’t help but be weary of him and his intentions. Micah partially succeeded in his goal which was finding out the cause of the disturbances but failed because the answer was only revealed because the demon let it.

Alexandra West is a freelance horror journalist and playwright who lives, works, and survives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in the Toronto Star, Rue Morgue, Post City Magazine and Offscreen Film Journal. She is a regular contributor to Famous Monsters of Filmland and a columnist forDiabolique with “The Devil Made Us Watch It.” In December 2012, West co-founded the Faculty of Horror podcast with fellow writer Andrea Subissati, which explores the analytical side of horror films and the darkest recesses of academia.

‘Demons:’ Finding New Language for an Old Cult Classic

I am a horror fan and most times I root for the monster. There, I said it. I root for what should be the feared. The dreaded Other. With all the loaded symbolism that the horror genre represents (fear of sex, fear of the unknown, fear of death and decay, xenophobia etc), I find it cathartic and often liberating to root for the disruption of life as we know it. I love watching humans deal with chaotic change.

Movie Poster of "Demons" — Movie Poster of *Demons*

Confession.

I am a horror fan and most times I root for the monster. There, I said it. I root for what should be the feared. The dreaded Other. With all the loaded symbolism that the horror genre represents (fear of sex, fear of the unknown, fear of death and decay, xenophobia etc), I find it cathartic and often liberating to root for the disruption of life as we know it. I love watching humans deal with chaotic change.

Chaotic change occurred for Hollywood in the 1980s when pretty much everyone I knew owned a VCR player and collected VHS tapes. People could lounge in the comfort of their own homes for just $1 (I remember paying that the first time I rented a tape at the neighborhood video store, before chain retailers like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video existed). For a junior high kid, this was cinema gluttony on the highest order. I could practically watch anything as many times as I wanted in my pajamas eating chocolate pudding and drinking Dr Pepper.

Although I was exposed to Italian giallo films early on at the drive-in while in grade school with classics like Suspiria, my viewing of the film Demons in the comfort of my living room introduced me to a whole new level of crazy Euro-gore. It also gave me a sneak peek of an actress who would later become a good friend in my adult years.

Demons (1985) has all the elements that make a great Euro-gore campy flick: tons of unearthly bodily fluids, unholy creatures ripping out of humans, bloody demonic possession, supernatural Nostradamus predictions, and a movie theater built on top of a gateway to hell. Classic Italian horror has no chill and will throw in everything and the kitchen sink. The actors are gorgeous and the movie has the quintessential throbbing 80s soundtrack with, for goodness sakes, Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” pumping the action along. Microwave popcorn heaven. The movie plot was ripe for a horror cinefile like myself.

Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) and Kathy (Paula Cozzo) arrive at the theater.

In a nutshell, Demons follows two college students, Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) and Kathy (Paula Cozzo), as they arrive at an ominous movie theater to see a free screening of an unknown movie. Cheryl was given a flyer in a subway station by mysterious man wearing a silver half-mask that concealed part of his face. Cheryl convinces Kathy to skip classes. In the theater lobby they encounter other movie patrons arriving, including a Black pimp and his two working-girls, one white, the other Black. Rosemary (the Black working-girl) sees a demonic silver mask hanging on a motorcycle display. She playfully puts on the mask only to have it scratch her face and draw blood. This being horror’s obligatory symbolic penetration (orally) of a female character. It’s the catalyst that ignites the evil to come.

Rosemary Wears Mask — Rosemary (Geretta Geretta) playfully wears mask that cuts her cheek.

Eventually the audience settles in to watch what turns out to be a horror movie (surprise!) about people discovering an ancient book and the same silver mask that Rosemary put on in the theater lobby. Rosemary’s wound starts to bleed again while watching the events unfold onscreen, so she goes to the restroom to staunch the blood flow, which has gotten worse, .. …yikes…it’s turned into squirting yellow puss. She becomes demon possessed and transforms into a hideous, green vomit-spewing supernatural contagion. Shenanigans ensue.

Rosemary (Geretta Geretta) becomes possessed.

What I always found to be a cool element of Demons was the film in the movie foreshadows what is to come for the film audience. And there are moments when the audience senses that this “movie” they are watching is not fiction. Eerily, a demon-possessed character in the theater film actually watches the mounting terror of the audience watching it back. The watchers become the watched. There’s also a subversive moment in the film that I latched onto as a kid, that I still find thrilling as an adult. The character of Rosemary (Geretta Geretta) on the surface plays into the classic stereotypical trope of the hyper-sexualized Black woman (she’s a hooker), and also the tiresome trope (and sad joke) of Black and/or non-white characters always dying first. But in Demons, Rosemary doesn’t die, she becomes transformed into a horrific Other, and takes everyone with her. She could kill people outright, or if she scratched anyone, they would turn into a demon too. I loved that element in the film. If she goes down, everyone goes down. She doesn’t disappear or fade into the background as Black characters often do. Hell, even the scorned Black pimp, Tony (Bobby Rhodes), takes on leadership of a more altruistic kind at one point in the film.

The beauty of revisiting old films that you loved as a youngster is that you get to change your mind about it as an adult. My first go-round with the film, I enjoyed the over-the-top craziness, and was actually excited when the heroine, Cheryl (The Final Girl), gets away with another theater patron, George (Urbano Barberini–The Final Boy) in what was a thrilling escape from the literal bowels of hell inside the possessed theater. But Demons throws in a Michael Jackson Thriller video ending, and has Cheryl break the fourth wall by turning around and showing us she has turned into a demon herself. This twist was foreshadowed by the slow camera pan towards the back of her head. I saw it coming but was thrilled nonetheless. Miss Goody two-shoes doesn’t get away.

But in hindsight, I’m now disappointed with this ending.

As an adult I had the pleasure of reading texts about filmmaking, horror theory, and feminist texts discussing the horror viewership of women and all the subtext that brings. As an adult, I view film with a more critical gaze, looking at context as well as content. Fresh eyes bring fresh views. What bothers me now about Demons that bugged me on the surface as a kid, is that Cheryl and George, the characters we are supposed to root for, start off as equals in the beginning, and end up taking on binary gender roles by the end.

Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) and George (Urbano Barberini) sense evil in the film they watch.

Cheryl and George are strangers when we meet them at the eerie theater. They are both on neutral gender ground. They both are frightened by the movie that they watch together, and they are both proactive in surviving. By sharing Cheryl’s emotional state, George is feminized in a way, and by sharing George’s active behavior in protecting themselves, Cheryl is given masculine traits. There is a balance. But once their friends are possessed and killed, Cheryl becomes a falling, weepy, girly mess that George has to prod along and save. George changes from clean cut preppy-looking Golden Boy in the beginning, into some Mad Max Samurai Warrior hybrid by the end. He turns into a movie superhero. Cheryl turns into a movie damsel you want to scream at. Patronizing patriarchy wins.

Tony the Pimp (Bobby Rhodes) leads other demon possessed theater patrons after more victims.

There is a moment near the end of the movie where gender balance appears to be restored. The mysterious man who gave away tickets to the evil screening stands atop the theater roof where Cheryl and George have made their way up to. There is a struggle, and both Cheryl and George impale the bad buy’s head through a metal pipe together. Shortly thereafter, we learn Cheryl’s real fate. As an adult, this is the moment that shows a missed opportunity to have the rare Final Girl/Final Boy moment alive and together at the end of the movie. Equally frustrating now is the fact that the narrative followed Cheryl in the beginning, castrated her agency in favor of some random guy, and steals her away at the end. Such a different read from my teenaged-self. But of course I’ve watched thousands of hours of film since then. I now have new language to call out what I couldn’t contextualize back then. However, I still have love for this film.

My favorite part of loving this crazy movie is the fact that many years later, while attending the Sundance Film Festival, I was able to share a townhouse with the actress who played Rosemary, Geretta Geretta. I walked into the townhouse kitchen knocking snow off of my boots, saw Geretta and squealed, “Ohmigod! You were in Demons!” Geretta stared at me and said, “You remember that movie? How old are you?”

Me (Lisa Bolekaja) and Geretta Geretta (my beloved Rosemary) hanging out at our favorite Hollywood Thai spot.

We’ve been friends ever since. I convinced her to start going to horror conventions to show people that women love horror too. Rosemary the Demon is just as iconic as Jason, or Freddy, or Michael. Female horror monsters need to be admired and respected too. And Demons is a cult classic. Geretta agreed.

Who would’ve thought that the demonic monster I was rooting for as a teenager would end up being my friend in real life? But it makes sense though. I love monsters. And they love me too.

Geretta Geretta taking my advice and bringing female horror icons to conventions worldwide.

Seed & Spark: Gaslighting, Demonic Possession, and the Unreliable Female Brain

I love a good psychological thriller, especially if it involves insanity. The fear that I might be insane, that my perception might be warped, that instead of calmly walking to the bus stop, I am actually muttering to myself (scraping my clawed fingers along the yellow wallpaper) is a driving force in my creative process. The boundary between perception and reality is fertile ground for filmmaking, but I wonder why it’s always women whose brains get warped or permeated? I know our lady parts are conduits to Satan, and old Hollywood liked us vulnerable and prone to hysteria… But are we really getting tricked all the time, or is there a feminist edge to the gaslight thriller?

Juno Temple in "Magic Magic" — Juno Temple in *Magic Magic*

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Brooks

Gaslighting is a psychological term that actually comes from cinema. In the 1944 film Gaslight, an evil husband convinces Ingrid Bergman that she’s losing her mind, so he can steal her inherited jewels. (That film was based on an earlier film and a play before that, but let’s give the credit to Ingrid B. because she made it glamorous). Gaslighting is a form of manipulation and abuse where the victim’s sanity is questioned, and they are made to doubt their perception of reality. In real life, the use of gaslighting to undermine a victim is the terrain of deranged psychopaths and sociopaths, but like a lot of twisted stuff, it makes a great film plot.

Ingrid Bergman in "Gaslight" — Ingrid Bergman in *Gaslight*

Take, for example, The Innocents from 1961. Miss Giddens, a blonde and naïve nanny accepts a job to care for orphans at a creepy English estate. The children behave strangely, and we’re not sure if Miss Giddens is insane or if ghosts have possessed the little ones (spoiler: the kids are possessed). Gaslighting creates unstable narration, a protagonist who doesn’t trust her own brain. The trick works best when it catches the audience. We see through the eyes of the heroine, and it makes us paranoid: Is she crazy? Am I crazy? The tension delights us.

Deborah Kerr in "The Innocents" — Deborah Kerr in *The Innocents*

In the classic film Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary Woodhouse is paranoid about her pregnancy pain, her neighbor’s herbal remedies and her husband’s secret plotting. The trick to good gaslighting is to hover on the edge of normalcy, to implicate the audience in the character’s insanity. But, like Miss Giddens, Rosemary was right to be paranoid. She had been raped by the devil and was carrying his child.

Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby" — Mia Farrow in *Rosemary’s Baby*

What I’m trying to say is that classic cinema is really hostile towards women, constantly questioning their ability to perceive reality, calling up the old “hysterical women” stereotype. These women, though, aren’t crazy. They live in fucked-up supernatural worlds. In that sense, a film like The Innocents actually affirms its female characters: Miss Giddens is a capable detective, in spite of her swooning and fainting.

Magic Magic, the best film you didn’t see in 2013, plays on some of the traditional gaslighting structures, but takes them in new directions. (You didn’t see the film because Sony got pissed that it wasn’t an out-of-the-box horror thriller and chose not to release it). Like The Innocents, it stars a young blonde, Alicia (Juno Temple), in the creepy and isolated environment of a vacation cottage on an island in Southern Chile. Her companions are hostile strangers, friends of a cousin who mysteriously left the group and returned to the city. The camera lingers in mirrors and paranoia blossoms.

Michael Cera’s character, Brink, relentlessly hits on Alicia in deranged and unsettling ways, one of them involving a dead parrot. Alicia retaliates by pussificating him, i.e. suffocating him in her crotch, but it’s not really her who’s doing it—she is in some kind of a hypnotic trance. The film hovers on the edge of sanity, builds layers of unreality, but it doesn’t reveal and redeem. Magic Magic ends with a sharp turn; instead of affirming good female detective work, it doubles back and eats its tail. I won’t say more because I want you to see the film, but it’s a real creeper.

Gaslighting isn’t inherently gendered. It’s just that our culture prefers watching a woman on the brink. Weird films, art films and experimental cinema have been writing weak-minded men for decades. My favorite example of a man in the gaslight is Possession, a 1981 French horror film by Andrzej Zulawski.

Isabelle Adjani in "Possession" — Isabelle Adjani in *Possession*

The basic plot is that this guy, Mark, comes back from a sketchy business trip (briefcases stuffed with cash) and notices that his wife Anna is acting really strange. She tells him that she wants a divorce and then she moves out. He hires a private investigator to follow her, and reality starts to shimmer like the tarmac on a hot day. Actors play multiple characters. Dialog becomes disjointed. Turn a corner, and you’re back where you started. We’re not sure if we’re inside Mark’s paranoid mind.

It’s hard to say that Possession is a true feminist film because it does turn out that Anna is having lots of sex with a demon/alien and she pukes extraordinary amounts of green, slimy bile in a subway station…but at least it’s Mark who gets confused. And Anna and the alien do win in the end, though it’s hard to say if she wins or if the alien devours her completely like it does Charlize Theron in The Astronaut’s Wife.

Given these examples, one might conclude that men can gaslight women, but only aliens can gaslight men. I say: stay hopeful, female fans of the supernatural thriller. One of these days, the women will overpower the aliens.

Elizabeth Brooks is the director of Kibuki: Spirits in Zanzibar. She is a mixed media artist and a member of the San Francisco experimental cinema community. Her work explores the boundary between fact and fiction, using film, video, writing, and sound to blur the line between memory and imagination. She holds an MA in African Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was a 2010 recipient of a Fulbright grant to Tanzania. She currently works as the Youth Curriculum Manager at the San Francisco Film Society, and her bilingual children’s book, Mama Has a Job, was recently selected for publication by Mkuki na Nyota publishers in Tanzania.