THE EMPIRE MASTERPIECE
Possession
WHY ANDRZEJ ŻUŁAWSKI’S HORROR MOVIE WON’ T LET YOU GO
WORDS ADAM SMITH
FILM LOVERS OF a certain vintage have much to thank the Director of Public Prosecutions for. In 1983, the government’s smut-finders general released a list of movies so shockingly depraved, so utterly dangerous that they must be consigned to legal oblivion. Behold the video nasties! And thus a whole generation of future cinephiles was provided with its first ‘must see’ list.
In the decades that have followed, some of those cinematic outlaws have been recognised as genre classics —The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Last House On The Left (1972), The Evil Dead (1981) —and others have revealed themselves as the meretricious, if entertaining, exploitation tat that they always were. They have been defanged, neutered, and rendered safe.
Apart from one.
Andrzej Żuławski’s lunatic divorce drama Possession has always defied easy characterisation and is undiminished by the passage of time. It is as shocking, unmooring, bizarre and gruelling today, 40 years later, as it was when it was being snatched by plod from the lower shelves of mom-and-pop video stores.