Friday, November 07, 2014

Divorce and Demons: an un-remarked upon subgenre of horror

It might just be an accident; perhaps I watched the wrong two movies in proximity to each other. But I'm suddenly wondering if there's an unremarked upon subgenre of horror that uses demonic possession and/or exorcism as a tool for exploring a parents' reactions to changes in their children, after getting divorced.
The two films that seem to work the same theme are The New Daughter (2009) and The Possession (2012). They both have a fair bit in common. In both films, there are two children who are being raised by their father, after he separates from their mother. In both films, one of the children - a female, of course  - becomes possessed by an ancient evil, and starts to manifest strange and unwelcome behaviour. In both films, peripheral characters are killed as the demonic possession gets worse. There are di rigueur scenes in which the father must research the nature of the demon, reading books and talking to scholars and priests and so forth (in The Possession, filmed in Vancouver, one of the experts is played by Jay Brazeau!). The climax in each case involves the father putting himself at risk to save his daughter, who has now transformed into something nearly unrecognizable and very dangerous. There seems to be some sort of element of projection at work, a desire to offset the cause of the unwelcome behaviour: my child is not acting in this strange, destructive way because he/ she is pissed off at me for having fucked up my marriage - nooo, it's because she's possessed! The fathers in both films - played in the first by a rather wooden Kevin Costner, and in the second by a very warm and likable Jeffrey Dean Morgan - have rather different degrees of success; in the first (SPOILER!) the Dad and his whole family are, apparently, eaten by the demons (or monsters, or whatever they are), while in the second, the father not only saves his daughter, but his marriage... but still, the parallels between these films run deep enough that they seem to be tapping into the same pools of the collective unconscious. Plus I feel like I've seen other movies like this, which I can't now bring to mind...

Obviously The Exorcist and The Brood are important films in the development of this subgenre, but what's curious is that there doesn't seem to be a list made of "divorce horror movies." There are lots of divorce movies listed on line, but they're all stuff like War of the Roses or Kramer Vs. Kramer. Googling "demons and divorce" seems to net a lot of websites where people actually believe demons are at work in causing a divorce, that give helpful tips for battling them, but that's not exactly what I want. And of course, looking for demonic possession movies online gives a long list of non-divorce-themed films. This seems to be a job for those fancy Netflix search engines - except I don't have Netflix. Could someone maybe do a search for "demonic possession divorce movies" or such? I'm really curious what other films deserved to be grouped together here.....

1 comment:

Allan MacInnis said...

By the way, no offense to Kevin Costner above. The New Daughter just ain't his finest moment. It came somewhat as a shock to me the other day, to watch The Guardian for the first time and hear John Doe singing a version of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You." That plus the appearance of Chris Desjardins in No Way Out make it seem like Costner and I might have some similar tastes in music. Not that there seems much that's punk rock about Kevin Costner on the surface, but...